Hippies vs. Punks: Taxi Driver (1976), Pt. 1, Arthur Bremer's An Assassin's Diary

Why are we here at Taxi Driver? It started last month by discovering a used copy of Devo's last big album, Oh, No! It's Devo (1982). One song, "I Desire," is written by John Hinkley, Jr. I had forgotten about John Hinkley, Jr. He was a forlorn figure that personified the first years of the 1980s. Hinkley attempted to murder Ronald Reagan because Hinckley was living out his obsession with Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Hinckley imagined himself as Robert De Niro's character in the film, Travis Bickle, a disturbed ex-Marine and presidential-candidate stalker who, in a bloody shootout, rescues Jody Foster's character, Iris, from a life of street prostitution.

Wednesday it was announced (Gardiner Harris, "John Hinckley, Who Tried to Kill Reagan, Will Be Released") that Hinckley will be released after 35 years in confinement:

Mr. Hinckley was once psychotic and depressed. After seeing the 1976 film “Taxi Driver,” in which a disturbed man plots to assassinate a presidential candidate, he became fixated on Jodie Foster, who played a child prostitute in the film.

Mr. Hinckley began to identify with the main character in the film, Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro.

After Ms. Foster entered Yale University, Mr. Hinckley moved to New Haven to be close to her and left notes, letters and poems at her dormitory. Failing to win her affections, Mr. Hinckley stalked President Jimmy Carter and was eventually arrested on firearms charges. After the 1980 election, Mr. Hinckley stalked the newly elected President Reagan in an attempt to impress Ms. Foster.

On March 30, 1981, after more unsuccessful trips to New Haven, Mr. Hinckley wrote a letter to Ms. Foster describing his plan to kill Reagan. He waited outside the Washington Hilton Hotel for Reagan to arrive and waved at the president as he went inside to deliver a speech.

Forty minutes later, when Reagan emerged from the hotel, Mr. Hinckley crouched down and fired six shots, hitting four men: Reagan; James S. Brady, the White House press secretary; Timothy J. McCarthy, a Secret Service agent; and Thomas K. Delahanty, a Washington police officer. Mr. Brady sustained permanent brain damage and eventually died from his injuries in 2014.

A jury found Mr. Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity, a decision that shocked the public and lawmakers across the country. He was sent for treatment to St. Elizabeths, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, where he has been confined ever since.

Taxi Driver was written by Paul Schrader who said he was inspired by Arthur Bremer's An Assassin's Diary (1973). Arthur Bremer shot and paralyzed George Wallace in 1972, ending the Alabama Governor's aspirations for a national political career. There is very little in common between the screenplay and the Bremer book, other than the narrative convention of a young man recording his thoughts in a journal.

This past Sunday I finished reading An Assassin's Diary, and I was blown away by what an obvious fraud it is. There is no way an unemployed 21-year-old Milwaukee busboy could have written An Assassin's Diary. Absolutely no way. Anyone who has toiled with letters will reach the same conclusion; Gore Vidal did in a 1973 New York Review of Books essay, "The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt."

This sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to understand why there hasn't there been more of a hullabaloo over such an obvious fraud. Bremer crippled the man who is responsible for the birth of the present-day Republican Party. Kevin Phillips designed Nixon's Southern Strategy to co-opt Wallace's nascent third-party juggernaut American Independent Party. In 1968 Wallace had run one of the most successful third-party presidential campaigns in the history of the United States, winning five states.

Wallace relied on two things to garner support: negrophobia and Hippie-bashing. Wallace also pioneered the demonization of the Washington bureaucrat. But his overwhelming appeal to voters was based on skewering the negro and the longhair.

Wallace was running strong again in 1972, when, on May 15, Bremer shot and crippled the Alabaman at a shopping center campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland. Nixon went on to trounce McGovern in one of the greatest electoral routs ever.

It goes without saying that Nixon benefited by Wallace sitting out the election in a hospital bed. Many feel that the 113-page diary found in Bremer's '67 Rambler after the shooting, presumably the manuscript Harper's Magazine Press published as An Assassin's Diary in 1973 (portions of which first appeared in the January 1973 issue of Harper's Magazine), was written and planted by the White House Plumbers in order to convince the public that Bremer's original target was Nixon not Wallace. That is why the most developed passages of An Assassin's Diary are those that describe Bremer's trip to Ottawa to kill Nixon, who was on a state visit to the seat of Canadian government.

If people believed that Bremer originally meant to kill Nixon then they wouldn't suspect that Bremer was a Nixon agent or dupe. The Ottawa passage convinced me that An Assassin's Diary is ghost written. (Vidal argued that there are too many literary references for a high school graduate who only had pornography and comic books in his apartment when it was searched; also, there is too deft a utilization of potboiler conventions, such as front-loading a sex scene, to be the work of an amateur.) The book has been heavily edited. Misspellings are used as camouflage to obscure a skillful professional pen at work. Complicated action flows precisely. Street names are used. The writing is done decorously except for all those ludicrous misspellings. If you kept a journal when you were in your early 20s, as I did, you are aware that it was nothing like the powerful economy of An Assassin's Diary.

Let's take a look. Here is a passage, pages 70 and 71, from An Assassin's Diary. Bremer has just arrived in Ottawa, and he is waiting alongside the road near a military base for Nixon's motorcade to pass. He is considering trying to get a shot off.

It was a long wait. 40 minutes at least, maybe over an hour. Some cops on bikes roared by people got out of their cars & went to the curbless, sidewalk less road. I joined in.

False alarm. Stayed out of the car 10 minutes, fingers got nume. That wouldn't do. I went back in & turned the heater on, still listening to the radio for news flashes. Earlier, I had seen the emty President's Lincoln Continental & all his cops & cars going in to the Uplands base. Against ten-of-thousands of people & tens-of-millions of dollars . . . 

I had worn a 3 inch "Vote Republican" button & a 3 inch "Richard Nixon (with his picture)" button to watch the motorcade. I exchanged looks at Mr. Moustache, my gun inside my pocket. Fantasied killing Nixon while shooting right over the shoulder of that cop.

Came out & went inside again. Longjohn weather. I was conscience of my hands. Didn't want to keep them inside of my pockets & get searched. Didn't want to keep them out & nume them too much.

Some folks there kept their hands in their pockets almost all the time, they weren't questioned & either was I. But I wanted to be careful, didn't know if a stop & frisk law existensed or what my rights were as an American here. Felt added confidence with my suit on & short hair & shave.

Didn't recognize my self clean shaven at first. My head hair came in nice & thick.

People jumped from their cars. Would the assassin get a good view? Everyone moved in close (about 20 people). We were the only people other than the cops for a few blocks.

He went by befor I knew it. Like a snap of the fingers. A dark shillowet, waving, rushed by in the large dark car. "All over", someone said to no one in particular. The following cop cars had 2 antentenas each & probaly walkie-talkies too -- jam proof communications. Umbrella in one hand, pocket in the other, I walked back to my car. I had missed him that day. The best day to make the attempt was over, I thought.

Sort of Jack Kerouac's Doctor Sax in Papa Hemingway's prose banged out on Mickey Spillane's manual typewriter. No way, no how written by a young dude with a semester of technical college. There are plenty of red flags -- reference to stop-and-frisk laws and jam-free communications; the use of synecdoche, "Mr. Moustache" -- that point to someone much older and more experienced. Most likely a middle-aged cognac-drinking operative penned this journal. The biggest tell is the management of the scene's action, which is complex, complete with backshadowing -- "Earlier, I had seen the emty President's Lincoln Continental & all his cops & cars going in to the Uplands base." -- and foreshadowing -- "I went back in & turned the heater on, still listening to the radio for news flashes."

Compare it to my own journal entry, written when I was 24, three years older than Bremer, after six years at Cal Berkeley, four of which had been spent working as an assistant instructor teaching reading and composition. I am writing about a winter cross-country trip I made from New York City to California in a VW bus:

Spent the night in a Pennsylvania (name of town now forgotten); it must've been Northeastern. I pulled off the highway, which ran through this town. My feet were pretty well without feeling. I parked the car next to this old shutdown warehouse and went out to take a piss. It was really cold. The wind was dark and howlin'. The wind was blowing through the cracks in the bus. I unfurled my bedding. My feet were wet and as cold as ice.

I'll never have that freedom again. Driving in the sunset; pointing my nose west; the world was on fire and yellow. It was golden and I couldn't see anything, but I could see enough. Hours driven this way. Hours driven alone without the radio.

Got to California. Oil snakes on the road. Drove miles this way. Big brown and red snakes crawling along with me. I slept a few miles out of Barstow with the truckers; the old bus; I didn't put my blanket over me, and I woke up almost frozen to death. But I got it out and got it over me.

Okay so there you have it. Twenty-four and still very boyish and childlike. This despite reading plenty of Plato, Hobbes, Defoe, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Hardy et al., as well as possessing a good knowledge of the rules of grammar and punctuation. There is no way I ever could have described the Nixon motorcade scene.

The question then is if Bremer didn't write An Assassin's Diary who did? Besides someone affiliated with Nixon, the only other obvious answer is someone at Harper's. But if Harper's was going to completely rework whatever original manuscript was found in Bremer's Rambler why leave all those misspellings? Obfuscation is the only answer. And if obfuscation is the answer then that points to Nixon.

An Assassin's Diary was the second part of Bremer's journal. The first 148 pages, dated March 1 - April 3, 1972, he buried in Milwaukee; they were discovered in 1980 and are now part of the collection of Reynolds-Finley Historical Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Assuming the 113-page source material for An Assassin's Diary is still intact, it would be easy enough to compare the two for inconsistencies. Of course if one was a phony the other one is probably a phony too. But to maintain the fiction, both would have to come from the same pen; otherwise, discrepancies should be noticeable. (There was a Baltimore Sun article from 20 years ago pointing out that Bremer didn't get a fair trial.)

Interestingly, Travis Bickle's famous line from Taxi Driver, "Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets," a sentiment worthy of a Wallace supporter, is not plucked from Bremer's journal but from one of the novels, Angel Eyes (1961), that Howard Hunt wrote under the pseudonym Robert Dietrich. Vidal quotes it in his NYRB essay. The hero of the potboiler, Steve Bentley, talks of Washington, D.C., "with its 'muggers and heroin pushers and the white-slavers and the faggotry . . . . This town needs a purifying rain!' "

Schrader no doubt read Vidal's NYRB piece and purloined that line from Hunt. Did E. Howard contact Schrader after Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or for 1976?

The irony here -- but one that I think is very illuminating -- is that Taxi Driver owes more to the chief of the White House Plumbers than poor little Artie Bremer.

In part 2, we'll look at the film itself and discuss the score of the great Bernard Herrmann.

Hippies vs. Punks: Peter Gabriel 3 (1980)

The 1980 Peter Gabriel song "Family Snapshot" is often considered to recount a combination of Bremer's attempt on Wallace and the assassination of JFK. The song told from the point of view of a would-be assassin, suggests that the action he is taking as an adult is to make up for the attention he never received as a child.

Tim Huddleston, The Real Life Taxi Driver: A Biography of Arthur Bremer, The Real Inspiration of Travis Bickle, 2013.

Let's tarry a while longer in the early 1980s. First, a quick recap on why we are here. A couple weeks back, browsing in one of the city's few remaining large used record stores, I stumbled upon a scuff copy of Oh, No! It's Devo (1982), the last album the spud boys produced while still in the limelight. An unremembered gem from Oh, No! It's Devo is "I Desire," a song co-written with Reagan's attempted assassin John Hinckley Jr.

Hinkley tried to kill Reagan because he wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster. Hinckley was obsessed with Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), a Paul Schrader screen-play interpretation of the diary of Arthur Bremer, George Wallace's attempted assassin. (Gore Vidal argued in The New York Review of Books that Bremer's An Assassin's Diary (1973) was ghost written by White House Plumber E. Howard Hunt.)

Taxi Driver stars Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a loner, ex-Marine who decides to kill a presidential contender to impress the beautiful campaign worker (played by Cybill Shepherd) after she dumps him for taking her to a Scandinavian pornographic film on their first date. Jodie Foster plays a young runaway, Iris, street hooking for a pimp played by Harvey Keitel. Travis, after botching an assassination attempt on the Kennedyesque presidential contender, shifts his focus to liberating Iris from white slavery.

As Tim Huddleston summarizes:

Probably the biggest impact Bremer had on the world was to provide Paul Schrader with the inspiration to create the character Travis Bickle, portrayed by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's brilliant 1976 film, Taxi Driver. Then, in a case of life imitating art imitating life [which, if Vidal is correct, was actually a Hunt contrivance], John Hinckley, Jr., who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, claimed to be inspired by Travis Bickle, who had been inspired by Arthur Bremer. All three men, including the fictional one, failed in their efforts.

All this got me thinking about Jodie Foster's Army (JFA), a Phoenix Hardcore Skatepunk band formed in 1981 in the wake of Hinckley's real-life reenactment of Taxi Driver. JFA records were everywhere during my lower-division undergraduate years, 1982-1984. One takeaway from my JFA study last week was the realization of how dark things were that late fall of 1980 on into the spring of 1981.

I have this memory of my mother going off to vote for Jimmy Carter before the polls closed at the high school gymnasium. It was already apparent that Reagan would win in a landslide. But she, a good liberal Democrat (just think how rapaciously liberals have been fucked, mostly with their consent, the last forty years) went out and voted anyway. I remember that November evening being very cold and inky black. A month later we would watch the television news of the murder of John Lennon.

This past week I wanted to sample something that my friends and I were listening to during this time, and I made a decision with hardly any thought to sync my iPod with Peter Gabriel albums. Sunday, while reading, the iPod plugged into a docking station with decent speakers, Peter Gabriel 3 (1980), a.k.a. Melt, started playing. Forty-five minutes later I was stunned. What an incredible album! 

Listening to Melt again -- and I listened to Melt and its followup, Security, a lot back in the day -- it all immediately became clear, the 1980s that is. 

Peter Gabriel 3 is the key code for the decade to come. The signature "gated drum" sound of "Intruder," announced on the album's first track (see the YouTube three paragraphs above), played by Phil Collins but crafted in collaboration with producer Steve Lillywhite, Gabriel himself and engineer Hugh Padgham, runs throughout Melt, but particularly the first cuts: "Intruder," "No Self Control," and "I Don't Remember."

"

No Self Control

I Don't Remember

The gated drum sound is like a juiced-up, cyborg version of the Japanese taiko, bottom heavy and resonant of infinite black space. Phil Collins would cash in big half-a-year later with "In the Air Tonight," the huge hit single off his 1981 solo debut, Face Value.

At a time when neoliberalism is attaining escape velocity, the gated drum, accompanied by the Frippian guitar burst, basically recreates rock 'n' roll in the 1980s. Hippies vanish beneath a banker's suit and Punks go post- into New Wave House music. (John Lydon devotes an entire PiL album, 1981's The Flowers of Romance, to the drum sound of Melt.) Powerful stuff. Imagine Miami Vice or the puissant Michelob commercials of the 1980s, what I used to refer to as "television on TV," without the gated drum. You can't do it. It made us believe that what we were doing was somehow new. And so was capitalism.

Peter Gabriel 3 makes it all possible. Sure, the gated drum would have come along and become popular. But Melt provided a Garden of Eden, a place at the beginning of the world. It is a flawless record, a perfect melding, thanks to Steve Lillywhite, of prog-rock Hippies with Punk rockers, creating a monstrous third way. I think my favorite cut is the last track on side one, "And Through the Wire," with The Jam's Paul Weller on lead guitar:

Having recently finished reading Philip Jenkins' Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (2006), I was reminded how much the year 1980 scared the shit out of people. Iran and Afghanistan inaugurated a rightward shift in the country that has never been reversed. 

Hippies vs. Punks: JFA (Jodie Foster's Army)

It’s funny. Back then everybody hated Punks: jocks, preppies, teachers, hippies, heavy metalers, moms, dads, little old ladies, cops, dentists, used car salesmen… They were all out to get you. All you had to do was have messed-up hair or some crazy shirt and they’d yell, “Hey DEVO!” because that’s what they thought was Punk Rock at the time. A flock of hippies would be driving in a Camaro and throw beer bottles at your head for walking down the street. Jocks would mob your ass. If you ran across a cop somewhere, forget about it… Funny thing is that now all of those people are into Punk. Or at least they think they are. Or at least they think what they’re listening to is Punk. Or even if they’re listening to it, they don’t necessarily understand it.

Brian Brannon, Jodie Foster's Army (JFA) vocalist, interviewed by Steve Scanner, December, 2009.

The last Hippies vs. Punks post left off mentioning that the lyrics to Devo's song "I Desire," the second-to-last track on the 1982 album Oh, No! It's Devo, were taken from a John Hinckley, Jr. poem written to Jodie Foster.

This got me thinking about the Hardcore Punk band ubiquitous during my early-'80s youth, Jodie Foster's Army.

I never owned any JFA records nor can I recall any of the band's songs (like I can recall Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized," for instance), but JFA was a vaguely menacing presence in my mind nonetheless. Why? Because frequenting Rasputin Records on Telegraph Avenue in the early 1980s JFA records were everywhere.

(This is something that I have wanted to pursue in these Hippies vs Punks posts from the beginning: bands that exerted an influence without ever having been consciously heard, an excellent example of which for me is Crass. The black-&-white stenciled art that adorned the Anarchist Punks' albums was as much a part of my semiotic universe as Old Glory.)

Jodie Foster's Army were a quartet of Phoenix skateboarders who formed after seeing D.O.A. in 1981. The band's sound as recorded on disks from the early 1980s is quintessential Hardcore Punk.

Piecing together JFA's discography is not easy if you are a collector. The band's seminal records from the 1980s are not available for download. Thank goodness everything is pretty much available on YouTube. A good place to start is at the beginning. JFA's first record is the Blatant Localism (1981) EP. From there you can move to the first album, 1983's Valley of Yakes. A cut, "Great Equalizer" can be found below.

Next is the all-important year for Hardcore, 1984. JFA releases three records, the Mad Garden EP, the Live 1984 Tour album and the eponymous JFA.

For a one-stop intro, your best bet is the Alternative Tentacles compilation, We Know You Suck (2003).

I got misty one evening this week listening to the Live 1984 Tour album. This was my generation. And while I was not a JFA fan, I was a big fan of the Minutemen, Black Flag and the DKs and other practitioners of California Hardcore. You can see what that generation looked like by taking a peek at the video from the CBGBs show that comprises more than half of the tracks on the Live 1984 Tour. That is how we dressed. Simply. Cotton shorts with either a tee shirt or a button-up Arrow short sleeve. Hair was hair. Usually you buzzed it off and then let it grow out for a year.

And what got me misty -- of course this could be a Gen X version of Boomer nostalgia -- was the purity. Certainly it was of a type that was lily white and almost entirely male, but there was a purity there that I am not aware exists today.

So this got me thinking, What was our milieu that created this militant, anti-establishment, anti-Reagan pose? And what I came up with is a sample of events from late fall 1980 to spring 1981. On December 8, 1980 you had the murder of John Lennon by Mark Chapman. Bobby Sands begins his hunger strike on March 1, 1981. John Hinckley, Jr. shoots Reagan on March 30 based on an obsession with Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Bobby Sands dies May 5, 1981 and huge riots follow.

All these events were constantly on the news. Remember Al Haig's breathless "I'm in charge!"? I saw that in real time on television in a classroom in the English Department. And from there I probably ambled over to the library to read about the IRA hunger strikers in Time magazine.

We think our times are violent now. Well, they were violent back then too. And I think the Hardcore thing was that we were willing to fight back. We knew things were bad, and we were willing to step into the mix, even if it amounted to nothing more than a pointless thrashing the shit out of one another in the slam pit. I don't see that now. There is a book about that which is supposed to be good: Steve Fraser's The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (2015).

The Watts Rebellion: Has Trump Figured Out a Reboot of White Backlash Fifty Years On?

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the Watts rebellion. Usually referred to as the "Watts riots," in terms of importance the uprising in Watts over six days in August of 1965 is on a level with the Whiskey Insurrection or the Haymarket affair, if not more so.

Watts is where the civil rights movement ran aground in the 1960s, black nationalism became au courant and white backlash as the main political force in the country took hold. The politics of Negrophobia, as articulated in Kevin Phillips' seminal The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), recreated the Republic Party, helped elect Ronald Reagan and enshrined neoliberalism as the decades-long paradigm governing the Western world.

There is a decent opinion piece by Jeanne Theoharis, "50 Years Later, We Still Haven’t Learned From Watts," in today's paper which reminds us that racism is not confined to the criminal justice system; rather, it pervades the entire society, thereby maintaining the persistent underdevelopment of black communities that make uprisings in Baltimore and Ferguson inevitable.

The refusal to recognize the black freedom struggle pre-Watts became a way to avoid responsibility for an unjust, unequal city, long highlighted by black Angelenos, and an excuse to demonize them for the outpouring of anger during the uprising.

A similar framing exists today. While recent uprisings in Ferguson, Cleveland and Baltimore have prompted extensive reporting on injustice in law enforcement, municipal policy and the courts, few stories have focused on the groups and people in these cities that have been highlighting these problems for years. 

Such silences are comfortable. It is easier to cast people as “thugs” than to grapple with the ways we as a society haven’t listened and wouldn’t change. It is easier to frame the situation as regrettable but outside our control (the actions of certain bad cops) than to grapple with our responsibility in maintaining an unjust criminal justice system. In doing so, we cast these tragedies as discrete incidents — and escape our larger social responsibility.

This conclusion while not explicitly stated is perfunctorily limned in Jennifer Medina's frontpager, "Watts, 50 Years On, Stands in Contrast to Today’s Conflicts." The jaw-dropper that Medina delivers is that Watts in now 70% Latino:

This is not the same Watts their parents grew up in. While the area remains persistently poor, demographics have transformed it from an African-American enclave to a neighborhood that is more than 70 percent Latino. Many blacks have moved to the suburbs in the Inland Empire and the desert north of Los Angeles. Those changes have brought their own tensions; many black residents talk of feeling pushed out while Latinos have struggled to rise to political leadership.

One glaring blind spot in Kevin Phillips' otherwise downright oracular The Emerging Republican Majority is his failure to foresee the rise of the Latino voter. Latinos now dictate presidential elections in the United States. No Republican can win the White House polling 30% of the Hispanic vote (Mitt Romney won 27%). That is why there was a collective gasp of horror in the corporate suites of the Republican National Committee when Trump kicked off his presidential campaign by tagging Mexican immigrants rapists.

Say what you will about Trump, it should be apparent by now to everyone who follows politics that he has got game. Republicans even with Marco Rubio as the nominee are unlikely to win more than 35% of Latino voters. So Trump immediately attacked them in a bid to coalesce the white working class, ever jealous of its rapidly disappearing prerogatives, around his candidacy, not to mention a number of blacks as well. (Blacks, to risk an overly broad generalization, tend not to be huge fans of Mexican immigrants.) Laura Ingraham promptly declared Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric the coup de main of the GOP contest to date.

What this means in a general election campaign if Trump is the eventual nominee is difficult to suss out. Hillary says she is relying on a strategy of returning the Obama coalition to the polls. The Obama coalition path to victory is juiced turnout among blacks, Latinos, women and youth. Hillary cannot do this. Even if she is paired up against The Donald, I don't see her arousing much enthusiasm among Hispanics; on the other hand, I do see Trump cutting into black support for the Democratic ticket.

Maybe Trump has figured a way to reboot white backlash fifty years after the Watts rebellion.

Hippies vs. Punks: James Brandon Lewis' Days of FreeMan

James Brandon Lewis' new album Days of FreeMan was released last week. I've been listening to it non-stop. A smorgasbord of bass (Jamaaladeen Tacuma) and drums (Rudy Royston) led by Lewis' tenor sax, Days of FreeMan is an homage to Hip Hop of the 1980s and 1990s.

A good review by Jeff Simon of The Buffalo News just appeared:

“I didn’t grow up a hip-hop head,” says James Brandon Lewis, “but where I grew up in Buffalo, New York, on Freeman Street, the sound of hip-hop was ubiquitous. I decided to go back and explore that time through music.”

Don’t look now but the most spectacular marriage of jazz and hip-hop yet just came from an utterly extraordinary young tenor saxophonist from Buffalo who, quite frankly, makes Robert Glasper seem anemic and academic.

He’s been living and working in New York for years but “Days of Freeman” is an extraordinary musical autobiography of growing up in Buffalo where Lewis remembers “times being filled with nicknames, block parties, street football and my older brother being the ‘deejay’ of the household while my mom would be yelling ‘turn that crap down.’ ”

Here is a musical memoir in four chapters, whose first chapter is called “Buffalo Braves.” It’s a formidable musical memoir in which we hear, all through it, tiny snippets of Lewis’ grandmother philosophizing and reminiscing about hearing Mahalia Jackson in her church and being free in her life because she was taught how to love by her parents.

There are references to Wilson, N.Y., where “my family would fish and have fun times there.” We’re told in the publicity for “Days of Freeman” that the saxophonist poured over “hip-hop documentaries for up to eight hours a day” and dissected “albums by KRS-One, Digable Planets, Pete Rock and CL Smmoth, a Tribe Called Quest, Medeski, Martin and Wood, along with fearless jazz trumpeter Don Cherry’s 1985 album ‘Home Boy’ and Lauren Hill’s 1998 Masterpiece ‘Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.’ ” 

This is an utterly extraordinary disc – magnificently ambitious and completely achieved because of Lewis’ most important musical partners – drummer Rudy Royston and, most important of all, the late Ornette Coleman’s phenomenal bassist in his prime time band Jamaaladeen Tacuma. 

Even if it’s semantic news to listeners that, as Lewis says, “ ‘You know my steez’ is a common phrase in hip-hop referring to style, to be, to be yourself, your swag, your person, your vibe, your flow, the way you operate and function,” Lewis’ formidable playing in a pianoless trio over Tacuma and Royston seems, as does the whole disc, to take off from Sonny Rollins and edge out into the nearer regions of the two ferocious Davids, Murray and Ware. 

In his liner notes, Lewis’ co-leader of a group called “Heroes Are Gang Leaders,” Thomas Sayers Ellis, tells us, “The title of this recording could easily have been ‘Every Good Grandma Deserves a Jam Session or There’s a Riot-Horn Going On.” 

No small achievement by Lewis in this absolutely remarkable achievement is Lewis’ ability to get SONY’s newly re-awakened Okeh label to understand that such a vehemently personal excursion into sound and memory and tenor saxophone line was a good idea in an era where “the music business” and “jazz” are routinely thought to be at war.

Here, the product of a childhood in Buffalo he wants to tell the world about, is an authentic and brilliant new hero of 21st century jazz.

At times -- like on "Of Dark Matter," "Black Ark," and "Lament for JLew" -- you think you're listening to Funk Punk.

I wanted to make this post about "Blackness," how white America's inability to comprehend, make peace with, Blackness has been its undoing. We've been fighting the Civil War since before the Civil War. "Blackness" has dominated the politics of the United States since before the states were united. Our present political dispensation, neoliberalism, was locked in by a maestro of white backlash, Ronald Reagan, who went from being a washed-up Hollywood B-lister to Governor of California -- and then POTUS -- based on his ability to paint a malign picture of Blackness.

But now something seems to be finally changing. White supremacy is being exposed.

Blackness also played an important role in the undoing of the Hippie. The Manson Family, like Dylann Roof, was bent on fomenting a race war with Charlie's Helter Skelter plan. The murder of a black man, Meredith Hunter, by a Hells Angels biker crowned the anti-Woodstock of Altamont. The Weathermen went underground after the police murder of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton.

If white supremacy can be exposed and the backlash blunted, the revolution is here!

50th Anniversary of "The Speech" that Launched Reagan's Political Career

Next Monday marks the 50th anniversary of The Speech, "A Time for Choosing," a paid-for television spot for the Goldwater campaign, that launched Ronald Reagan's career as a national conservative leader.

All the bunkum is on display -- honest people yearning to be free from meddling, intrusive, redistributive government taxes and regulations -- and it is still on display today as Republicans, all Goldwaterites now, are poised for a great victory in two weeks.

The Republicans have not only been successful at controlling the agenda in Washington D.C., they now dominate state politics more than at any time since the early 1950s. As Thomas Edsall wrote recently in "The State-by-State Revival of the Right":

While politics in Washington remain gridlocked, the conservative revolution has been thriving outside the Capitol beltway.

Republicans in states across the Midwest and the South are determined to eviscerate liberal policies and to entrench the political power of the right.

Twenty-three state governments are now under the complete control – governor, house and state senate — of the Republican Party, more than at any time since Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952. Democrats control 14 states. The rest are divided.

Not only are Republicans today in charge of more states, they are exercising their power to gain partisan advantage far more aggressively than their Democratic counterparts.

The state-based revival of the right has the strong backing of conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Tax Reform, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS and the network of tax-exempt organizations tied to the Koch brothers. 

There are some common themes to the current Republican state-based agenda.
The most visible effort is the drive to gut public sector unions, a key source of votes and financial support for Democrats. Wisconsin, under Republican Governor Scott Walker, has led the charge on this front. With support from the Koch brothers, the state has severely restricted collective bargaining rights for public employees, ended mandatory union dues and limited wage hikes to the rate of inflation. 

Both supporters and opponents of Walker’s initiative realized that this was a key battleground – pathbreaking, in fact – hence the rallies, the recall and so on. 

Many Republican-controlled states have weakened or eliminated laws and regulations protecting the environment. In North Carolina the state legislature cut the budgets of regulators and prohibited local governments from enacting strict pro-environmental rules. The state chapter of the League of Conservation Voters has rated members of the legislature every year since 1999. Between 1999 and 2012, the group issued North Carolina a total of 48 scores of zero. In 2013 alone, 82 North Carolina Republicans got zeros. 

The anti-abortion movement has held sway in many of the 23 Republican-led states, successfully winning passage of legislation designed to force the closing of abortion clinics and to make access to related services as onerous as possible. The Guttmacher Institute publishes a description of state-level abortion laws. The measures adopted in conservative states generally include some or all of these restrictions: a woman must wait 24 hours and accept counseling designed to discourage abortion; a minor must obtain parental consent; public funding is restricted to abortions in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest; the woman must undergo ultrasound and the provider must show and describe the image to the woman. 

Perhaps the most controversial action taken by Republicans in states where they have power has been the approval of legislation designed to restrict minority and student voting through photo ID laws and limitations on early voting. In 2013, the North Carolina legislature enacted a major revision of state voting laws that Dan T. Carter, a prominent historian of the South, describes as the “nation’s most extensive effort at voter suppression.” Carter writes:

"Every change in North Carolina’s new election code was targeted at reducing potential Democratic voters regardless of race, creed, color or national origin. The state’s VIVA/Election Reform law, passed on a straight party line vote, now requires a government-issued photo ID card to vote, but rejects student IDs, public-employee IDs, or photo IDs issued by public assistance agencies. Other provisions end Sunday voting (African Americans have a tradition on voting after church) and straight-party ticket voting (fifty seven percent of straight ticket votes are by Democrats), shorten the early voting calendar, (Democratic voters are thirty percent more likely to vote early than Republicans), ban same-day registration during early voting, (a majority of same day registrants are Democrats)."

State level Republicans have taken a cue from tax bills passed at a national level during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to push through tax cuts with the lion’s share of benefits going to the top of the income distribution. Last year, for example, Mike Pence, the Republican governor of Indiana, signed legislation that slashed rates across the board and eliminated the state estate tax.

Edsall sees "a day of demographic reckoning" coming for the GOP when all the old white people who represent the Republican base die off and are replaced by young blacks and Latinos. But by then our merely formal system of two-party representative democracy will be even more constricted. Universal suffrage will no longer exist as a conservative federal bench continues to whittle down the franchise; at which point, the parties might not even feel it necessary to nominate people of color and women as window dressing.

Jack Reacher: It's Worth Watching

Last night I struggled to find a newly-released-to-DVD Hollywood blockbuster to stream. I considered Cloud Atlas but was scared away by its three-hour length. I would have gone with Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects, but it was only available to purchase on Amazon, not for rent. Taylor Hackford's Parker, starring Jason Statham, won't release for streaming until Tuesday. I mulled over the idea of Stand Up Guys, starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin, but judging from a few of the Amazon customer reviews I decided against it.

Then I noticed that Amazon is starting to offer "Watch While It's In Theaters" streaming for select movies. You pay more -- in this case, $2-$3 more than what it costs to stream a newly-released-to-DVD film. I almost pulled the trigger on Terrence Malick's To the Wonder, but I held off. I'm a big Terrence Malick fan. I think The Thin Red Line (1998) is a masterpiece. But I found The Tree of Life (2011), believe it or not, too esoteric and self-indulgent; and judging from a cursory glance at the customer reviews, To the Wonder is more of the same. I'll watch it at some point; it's just that last night I was not in the mood.

After about a half hour of this, I finally chose the Tom Cruise vehicle Jack Reacher. I hesitated because I've never been a huge Tom Cruise fan. I thought he was super as Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia (1999) and as the hitman in Collateral (2004). And come to think of it, he was incredible in Tropic Thunder (2008) -- really the best part of that movie by far. But my feelings about Tom Cruise are conflicted. He's of my generation. He comes on the scene at the same time as the country begins its full retreat Rightward with Ronald Reagan. The two films that rocketed Cruise into the Pantheon of Hollywood stars -- Risky Business (1983) and Top Gun (1986) -- are synonymous with the "Reagan Revolution" -- a mythologizing of American business and the military.

Here we are, three decades on, and Tom Cruise, a half century in age, is playing an ex-MP superman named Jack Reacher in a film adaptation of Lee Child's 2005 novel, One Shot. Christopher McQuarrie, of The Usual Suspects (1995) fame, writes the screenplay and directs. What cinched my decision to stream Jack Reacher was seeing that MacQuarrie was the guy who had written and directed Way of the Gun (2000), an excellent and too-little-appreciated movie starring Benicio del Toro and Ryan Phillippe.

The film opens with shots of PNC Park, where the Pittsburgh Pirates play, and the Allegheny River. The movie looks good. Pittsburgh looks like a nice city. Then you're looking through the scope of the killer's rifle deciding which passersby to snuff. Right away you know you're in for a treat.

This is a topnotch movie. And while it plays to a Red State, gun-toting, pro-military audience, it doesn't do it in an offensive manner. This is a testament both to McQuarrie's direction and Tom Cruise's performance. Supporting roles that stand out are Jai Courtney as the handsome heavy (Spartacus: Blood and Sand junkies will recognize him as Varro); David Oyelowo as the homicide detective; and the legendary Bob Duvall as the crusty gun-range owner and last-second O.K. Corral recruit. There is a tremendous car chase a little after the film's halfway point that is reminiscent of Bullitt (1968). Any movie that puts one in mind of Bullitt is worth watching!

Born in the Golden State Suburbs

The present day hard-shell Republican Party began its rise in the California suburbs of the 1960's. Goldwater's landslide loss to LBJ in 1964 is usually where people start. And there's some merit to that. Goldwater carried five states from the Deep South, almost the same five that third-party candidate George Wallace carried four years later (Goldwater won South Carolina; Wallace, Arkansas). This prompted Nixon to launch his Southern Strategy, which rapidly accelerated the conversion of the Republican Party.

But the first big win for the new, hard-shell type of Republican was when Ronald Reagan demolished incumbent Pat Brown in the California gubernatorial election of 1966. Then in 1978 there was Howard Jarvis' anti-tax uprising enshrined in California's Proposition 13. Reagan's ascension to the presidency two years later shocked many but it shouldn't have. The handwriting was on the wall for all to see.

Paul Krugman's column today, "Lessons From a Comeback," floats an argument that has merit. Since California is a bellwether of conservative Republicanism shouldn't we be paying attention to what's happening in the Golden State? And what's happening there is that the GOP has dwindled to such a small number that they can no longer block, even with supermajority rules, any and all legislation. As Krugman says,

California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making. 

And that’s where things get really interesting — because the era of hamstrung government seems to be coming to an end. Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct — and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right. 

And if this agenda is successful, it will have national implications. After all, California’s political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too. 

So is California still the place where the future happens first? Stay tuned.

Nationally the radical right's control of the House of Representatives appears to be on more solid footing -- because of the gerrymander and Citizens United. The House gives them all the structure they need to block and stymie for the foreseeable future; that, and they also control the Supreme Court. So anything progressive that squeaks through the legislature will be overturned by the judiciary.

Let's see how the GOP manages immigration reform. After the 2012 presidential election Republicans know they cannot win another national contest polling as low they do with Latinos. If they botch immigration, they'll likely be blocked from controlling the executive for a long time. But, really, why should hard-shell conservatives care? They're getting almost all of what they want with the current set up.

Hippies vs. Punks: "California Über Alles" 1979

By 1979 the Hippies are finished as a vehicle for cultural change. They have become part of the status quo; hence, the Dead Kennedys' "California Über Alles." Released as a single in June of 1979, the source of the song's ire is Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown is the current Governor of California, and he was Governor of California from 1975 to 1983 when Jello Biafra wrote "California Über Alles." Brown's nickname, coined by Mike Royko, was Governor Moonbeam. But that nickname, like the target of "California Über Alles," speaks not of a Hippie per se but what became of the Hippies when they returned to the rat race and accepted the yoke of corporate domination and with it their own niche in consumer society. This is New Age.

Jerry Brown is a great politician. Biafra's disdain was misplaced and his prediction not altogether accurate. "Carter Power" did "go away," but it was ushered out not by Brown but another California governor, Ronald Reagan. Maybe if like the Dead Kennedys you lived in the Bay Area it might seem as if New Ageism could sweep the nation in 1980; but the opposite was the case. The country was lurching rapidly to the Right and had been for several years. 

No, Jerry Brown's days in the national spotlight in the 1980's were numbered. His time had already come and gone. His time was 1976; but that year he ran a diffident, inscrutable presidential primary campaign and Carter cleaned his clock. If only Brown had run stronger -- he didn't have to win; he just had to bloody Carter more -- the outcome of the general election very well could have been different.

My idea, one I've entertained for a long time, is that if Gerald Ford would have beat Carter and won four more years in the White House, which Ford very nearly did anyway, we never would have elected Reagan in 1980 and suffered the decade-plus devastation his presidency wrought. What we needed was an additional four years of Ford. Four more years with Rumsfeld and Cheney at the controls, assuming we could have avoided a nuclear conflagration, would have certainly meant victory for the Democratic presidential candidate in 1980. The country by this time would have been absolutely exhausted with 12 years of Republican misrule. Either Jerry Brown or Teddy Kennedy could have won a general election race against anyone the GOP nominated. Reagan would have been blocked. And the working class -- meaning most of us, the 99% -- would be much better off today.

So when you listen to "California Über Alles" think back to that time when the Hippie was in the Punk's crosshairs and Jerry Brown was soon to be President of the United States.

"California Über Alles"

I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president...

Carter Power will soon go away
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
Your kids will meditate in school!

[Chorus:]
California Uber Alles
California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California
Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face

Close your eyes, can't happen here
Big Bro' on white horse is near
The hippies won't come back you say
Mellow out or you will pay
Mellow out or you will pay!

[Chorus]

Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece

Come quietly to the camp
You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't you worry, it's only a shower
For your clothes here's a pretty flower.

DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg's already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown
When you mess with President Brown

[Chorus]