Hot for Teacher-Adult Actress Teacher Stacie Halas Fired

I've got it bad
I've got it bad
I've got it bad
I'm hot for teacher
Hot For Teacher-Van Halen

It's been a minute since I was in grade/middle school. I don't remember having crushes on any of the women teachers there. I knew virtually nothing about their personal life and wasn't that interested. It was big news when occasionally their boyfriend or husband would pick them up from or drop them off at school. I mean who knew that Miss or Mrs. so-n-so actually had a life outside of the classroom? Of course I was a bit of a solipsistic young lad and the times were more conservative so it wasn't surprising that I didn't know anything about a teacher's extra curricular life or her activities and lifestyle before she became my teacher. Of course, as the Stacie Halas story shows us, maybe it's a good thing that I didn't know anything about my teachers' lives prior to them becoming an educator.

32 year old Stacie Halas was a California middle school teacher who was recently fired from her job. She lost her appeal of that firing as well. Why was she axed? Well she was terminated from her position because she was, prior to working as a teacher in her current school, but perhaps not other schools, an adult film actress. Evidently some other teachers and/or students recognized Halas' .... (ahem)... face and did some quick research to make sure. Once this information became public, Halas was let go. People found interviews in her movies in which she talked about being a teacher and hoped her other job choices would not be discovered. I wonder who got the job of downloading and reviewing those movies, purely for research purposes of course.

Her lawyer, Richard Schwab, said Halas had tried to be honest but was embarrassed by her previous experience in the adult industry."Miss Halas is more than just an individual fighting for her job as a teacher," he said Tuesday. "I think she's representative of a lot of people who may have a past that may not involve anything illegal or anything that hurts anybody."

Halas has been on administrative leave since the video surfaced in March. Teachers then showed administrators downloads of Halas' sex videos from their smartphones. 

In hearings, former assistant principal Wayne Saddler testified that, at the start of a sex video, Halas talked about being a teacher, and he felt her effectiveness in the classroom had been compromised.

In October, Oxnard Unified School District spokesman Thomas DeLapp told CBS Los Angeles that once students were able to find the videos of Halas on the Internet, they made it difficult for her to be an effective teacher."We even had kids who were referring to her by her stage name in class, from catcalls in the back," DeLapp said.

LINK

Of course there are other jokes I could make about this but right now I don't have any more*. When I first heard about this I was somewhat opposed to the school board's action because people can and do change. Do we want to put a scarlet letter on someone for the rest of their life for a bad, but legal choice they once made?  Halas' time as "Tiffany Sixx" appears to be in the past. It's not as if she were arriving directly from the studio sets to teach impressionable young teens/pre-teens and/or tell them all about her deeds. At least, that doesn't appear to have been the case. But thinking more about this teachers are indeed supposed to maintain a good moral example for the children they instruct. Performing circus sexual acts on film for money with men and other women is usually not considered to be setting a proper moral example. I used to be a 12 yr old boy. I can definitely say that Halas' effectiveness as a teacher would be near zero if she was teaching boys of that age. So for that alone, even if I don't care about her previous career, she'd probably have to find a different job.  

And while the sordid details of her paid interactions with men or women may have been outre, the fact is that virtually every teacher, heck almost every human being has had sex or will have sex at some point in their life. There's just a record of some of her activities.  If she had announced she was gay, should/could she have been fired for that? That is still considered deviant in some circles and to be setting a bad influence. But working essentially as a prostitute is, unlike gayness, something that still unites many on the feminist left and on the traditionalist right in disgust. So maybe it's not as cut and dry as people might think.

And let's be honest, it's not just about the children. That's something of a cop-out. I do not think that in the average corporate workplace, were it discovered that the budget analyst in general ledger was or had been an adult actress, that she would be able to keep her job, or at least keep her job with the same level of respect and productivity that she had had prior to that information becoming public. Is that fair? Probably not. People should be judged on what they do at work, not on what they've done in their private lives. But that's idealistic. The reality is that often you sell not only your on the job skills to your employer, but also the implied or actual promise that you won't embarrass your employer or bring undue complications to your job. If, for example, a man who was an actuary, supply chain mgr or officer for a Fortune 500 Company decided to supplement his salary by investing in perfectly legal strip clubs or lingerie football leagues, chances are good that his company might bid him adieu. That's just how it goes.

So what do you think?

Was the school district within its rights to terminate Halas?

Was it the right thing to do?

Would you be concerned if Halas were teaching your children?

If you were a male student in her class would you ask her for extra "homework" or some one-on-one tutoring? (*Ok, just one joke)

Movie Reviews-Zero Dark Thirty, The Baytown Outlaws

Zero Dark Thirty
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT) is an extremely well crafted film that flirts with a message that is morally despicable and vacuous. It is about the search for and ultimate assassination of Osama Bin Laden (OBL). The driving force behind this is a midlevel CIA analyst, Maya, played with barely restrained fury and icy discipline by Jessica Chastain. Maya is less analyst and more Valkyrie. Maya is likely a composite character. Does the first "other" in an environment need to try harder to fit into the dominant model? Yes. The first black policemen or firemen had to deal strategically with racism in order to lay the groundwork for those coming after them. In the seventies and eighties some professional office clothing for women tried to hide that women aren't men and don't look like men. In ZDT Maya is ice water, that is when she's not cursing at CIA Director Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini) or engaging in other bad behavior usually considered to be men's bailiwick. Perhaps this story element appealed to Bigelow, who is a first of her own. Only Bigelow can say for sure. It certainly seemed that way. 

Better writers and smarter people than I have debated ZDT's stance on torture. Naomi Wolf compared Bigelow to Leni Riefenstahl, which may seem like a low blow, but shows you how seriously people take the issues. Bigelow defended herself by writing that "depiction is not endorsement" and that smart or artistic people should understand that. I don't think that Bigelow consciously set out to make a pro-torture movie. And I don't know and don't really care about her politics or those of the film's primary actors. But she opened herself up to criticism by claiming that the film is "journalistic". ZDT is a film that strongly implies that:

• Torture works
• Torture helped us find OBL 
• Everyone in the relevant government agencies knew about the torture 
• A woman is heroic to the extent that she engages in morally questionable behavior, just like the guys 
• Torture is a fitting punishment for some people.

In ZDT no one questions torture's efficacy or morality. In real life, that wasn't the case. Torture did not help us get OBL. There are many US laws, international laws and UN treaties against torture. It is a war crime. There is no exception. It is a shame, a sin, and arguably a crime that President Obama did not prosecute those who tortured, ordered torture or wrote legal memos defending torture. But as Bigelow smartly shows, when Maya is watching a drone attack, is torture worse than killing someone without trial?  Bigelow worked with CIA sources for ZDT, presumably including some people who wanted a different story placed for public consumption. So you must take care watching this film. Despite the director's avowed best intentions it can come across as propaganda. 

When a film that depicts torture is ONLY concerned about the well being of the torturer (one person jokes he's seen too many naked men while another briefly shows her disgust at the stench of human feces) and NOT at concerned with the well being of the brutalized prisoner something has gone wrong. If you think torture is ok or argue that in this particular case we had to do it, I would just ask you where you are willing to draw the line? Were the cops who tortured black suspects in Chicago wrong? And what if, as shown in the Samuel Jackson movie Unthinkable, a prisoner won't break under torture himself but might break if his wife and children were harmed. Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to order or commit rape and worse on innocent women and children for the greater good? Unfortunately ZDT doesn't address or answer any of these questions. ZDT is a procedural detective story with a heroine instead of a hero. 

ZDT opens up with darkness and real life recordings of the 9/11 attack where 3000 Americans were killed. Maya is a novice CIA agent who has just been reassigned to the search for OBL.

In buttoned up attire, Maya arrives at a CIA black site where a CIA agent named Dan (Jason Clarke), Chastain's co-star from Lawless, is interrogating an Al-Qaeda minor functionary named Ammar (Reda Kateb). Dan is by turns solicitous and savage to Ammar, whom he has already viciously beaten and starved. When Ammar gives an answer Dan believes to be untrue it's waterboarding for him. Dan casually asks Maya to assist, which she does. This proves her bona fides to Dan, who takes her under his wing to teach her the ins and outs of detainee "interrogation" and how to navigate the treacherous political waters of the CIA and Washington D.C. scene. There is no sexual tension between them so Dan is a friendly big brother type for Maya. Maya is a quick learner with a fanatic attention to detail. She swiftly picks up on minute discrepancies between stories. She learns to tell the difference between someone who is lying to protect the Al-Qaeda organization and someone who is lying from fear but has no valuable information. 

Working primarily out of Pakistan, Maya gets to know Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) an older more experienced CIA officer who, after a bit of "who does this smart kid think she is" back and forth, becomes Maya's close friend and big sister/mother substitute. Maya is gung ho to find OBL. After Dan takes reassignment to Washington in part because he doesn't "want to be the last one holding the dog collar",  Maya steps up to lead her own interrogation team, ordering beatings and watching "interrogations" or drone attacks with clinical detachment.

Ammar makes an admission which sets Maya on the trail of Bin Laden's top courier and messenger, Abu Ahmed. And she's like a pit bull. Once she grabs hold she doesn't let go. Her singlemindedness brings her into regular conflict with her direct boss, Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler), CIA Pakistan Station Chief. Jessica is killed in the 2009 attack on Camp Chapman. Maya herself survives multiple assassination attempts. After these traumatic events the already intense Maya turns up the heat on herself and everyone else. The hunt for OBL becomes very personal for her. She reviews data and leads in which other people have lost interest. When her peers won't help she appeals, cajoles or finds ways to go around them. Maya's a very persuasive individual who never takes no for an answer. Eventually a detainee makes a mistake which Maya notices.

The story briefly veers into ever so slight ridiculousness as Maya is now more macho than every man she meets. Maya tells the Seal team that they are going to kill Bin Laden for her. When CIA Director Leon Panetta asks who she is, she replies "I'm the muyerfuyer who found Bin Laden". Right. Because people talk to their boss' boss' boss like that all the time. Maya daily harasses her new supervisors to devote what she considers to be proper time and resources to the OBL search. Basically she throws an extended temper tantrum. YMMV on this. I didn't care for it myself. It's not because it's a woman displaying jerkish behavior. I just don't like jerks. Period. I am repelled by real life women who wrongly think that acting like the crudest stereotype of men is the way to attain male respect. It isn't.

ZDT provides a cornucopia of very interesting and doubtless quite misleading information about the various methods and technologies used to locate Abu Ahmed and ultimately OBL. A little treachery, a little money and a lot of legwork evidently went a long way. ZDT is at its best when it shows the long arduous work needed to connect a seemingly innocuous comment from one detainee to a lie from another detainee to a strange behavior pattern from a man who has no legitimate reason to act strangely. Now do all that in a foreign country where your skin tone immediately marks you as an outsider. Obviously Seal Team Six does actually locate OBL and send him to hell.

I can't overemphasize how "real" this movie feels and how much of a skilled craftswoman Bigelow is. I loved her camera work. Everything, from the intelligence status meetings in Washington or Islamabad to the attacks in Afghanistan or Pakistan to the hesitant or aborted friendships among various CIA officers and staff, is so true to life it's like you were there. At lunch women giggle over the cute male co-workers and in the next breath discuss torture or executions. Bigelow has a great eye for detail. Although you already know the outcome Bigelow still makes a suspenseful movie. Chastain gives this film her best performance I've seen so far. Maya has no backstory, no love interest, and evidently no other goal in life than to locate and eliminate OBL.

My basic issue with ZDT is that I simply don't think it's very heroic to hurt living things who have no ability to respond. It's like shooting wolves from helicopters or beating up a six year old. That's what torture is. It's easy to front as a tough guy or gal when a man is tied up and you have two or three men the size of J.J. Watt helping you inflict pain on him. The Seal Team Six raid on Bin Laden's compound was more interesting to me because as soldiers, they accept the risk that people will be shooting back. I think that's more heroic. Watching someone be sexually humiliated or forced to crawl through his own excrement is not heroic. It did happen, though perhaps not quite as Bigelow shows it here. Torture hindered the search for Bin Laden. Senators McCain, Feinstein and Levin claimed the film was "grossly inaccurate". Bigelow's film makes you think torture was essential. Despite her protestations, it takes a side. And I'm not on that side.

Although the violence is explicit, it's not in the same universe as an average slasher/horror movie. It's not all that different than what's shown on Scandal, 24 or Homeland. This film has far too many top character actors to list. I got a kick out of seeing Stephen Dillane (Stannis from HBO's Game of Thrones) play a world weary National Security Advisor. I was hoping he would ominously intone "Osama will bend the knee or I will destroy him. The cold winds are rising." but no such luck. This film is long but never drags.
Other actors of note include Mark Strong, Joel Edgerton, Harold Perrineau, Edgar Ramirez, Chris Pratt, and Scott Adkins.

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The Baytown Outlaws
directed by Barry Battles

This film is like a less deliberately offensive The Devil's Rejects, though it certainly tries to be as offensive. I'm not sure the director's heart was as in it. Like that movie it takes characters who are dangerous, despicable and deadly and makes them the heroes by the simple trick of spending time with them, setting them against worse people and most manipulatively, giving them a child to protect. Still it was fun to watch if you're in the mood and I was so it's okay by me. You may feel differently. Some bigger name actors are slumming here and they appear to be having a good time. This film works if you don't think about it too much. Certainly the actors don't.

This film opens up with the Alabama based Oodie Brothers paying a visit to a house inhabited by drug dealers. There are three Oodie Brothers, Brick (Clayne Crawford) the oldest and leader who usually wears a Confederate Flag T-shirt, Lincoln (Daniel Cudmore), the middle brother and biggest/strongest who can't speak because of injuries suffered during wrestling, and McQueen (Travis Fimmel), the youngest and most hotheaded. The Oodie Brothers kill everyone in the house during the opening sequence. Unfortunately as McQueen discovers from a telephone bill, it was actually the wrong address. In flashback it's shown that all three of the brothers are dangerous killers with long records of mayhem and other crime.

A witness to their crime, Celeste (Eva Longoria), follows them back to their home and makes Brick an offer. Kidnap her godson from her estranged husband Carlos (Billy Bob Thornton) and she'll pay them handsomely. Intrigued as much by the sight of Celeste in cut-off jeans and a clingy top as by the $5000 down payment, Brick agrees, despite McQueen's angry insistence that intervening in custody disputes isn't really an Oodie business service.
Meanwhile a Northern ATF agent (Paul Wesley) tries to talk to the local sheriff Milliard (Andre Braugher) about the strangely low rate of crime in the area, the fact that so many criminals either disappear or turn up dead and oddities he's noticed about the Oodie Brothers. Sheriff Milliard pretends not to know what the agent is talking about and gives him the runaround with that peculiarly Southern mixture of politesse and hostility. It is jarring and funny to see a black man playing this archetype of Southern White Maleness. Braugher pulls it off perfectly, even throwing in a post-ironic dig about the Civil War.

As it turns out Milliard and Celeste were both less than truthful with the people questioning them. Celeste was married to Carlos but the boy she seeks to rescue, Rob (Thomas Sangster), is not her son or Carlos' son. Carlos murdered Rob's real parents. There's something else about Rob which explains why Carlos wants him. And Carlos isn't just some schmuck. He's an absentmindedly malicious drug dealer and gangster. When two hapless low level mooks make the mistake of letting Carlos know they'd do things differently, Carlos (paraphrasing) says "Let me stop you right there. See I see my empire as the Wal-mart of bottom-dollar retail crime. What you two yahoos are talking about is a word I don't like to use. Partner. I don't need partners. I need baggers. I need clerks. See partners lead to another bad word. Mutiny". It doesn't end well for the duo. Nevertheless the Oodies crash into Carlos' home and kidnap Rob, who isn't what they expected. They aren't able to kill Carlos though. He sets a number of different cartoonish hoodlums after them including female dominatrix/prostitute bikers, black gothic road warriors, and Native American thugs.

And Milliard knows the Oodies all too well as he is the closest thing to a Daddy they have. There's very little that they do that he doesn't direct or know about. And the movie lurches on its merry way. Mayhem, bloodshed and aforementioned tenderness for a helpless child ensue. Michael Rapaport has a cameo as a cowardly but horny bartender.
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Manti Te'o Girlfriend Hoax and Notre Dame

People will do anything to keep the hype going. That's the lesson I learned from the Manti Te'o story. Actually that's the second lesson I learned. The first lesson I learned about Manti Te'o was the one that Eddie Lacy delivered a few weeks back as he ran around, through, over and under Te'o in an Alabama a$$-kicking of the Notre Dame football team and especially of Te'o, whose job it was to stop the run. Ok well Eddie Lacy made Te'o look silly. But Lacy did that to a lot of people this year. No big deal, right? Te'o was still a character guy at a character school (Notre Dame) who had been through a lot of tragedy with his grandmother and girlfriend dying so close to each other (within 6 hours). Te'o was everything that was right about college football. He was classy, honest and hardworking. If he could persevere despite those body blow tragedies then surely we lesser beings could get off our keister, get out there and win one for the Gipper, right?

Well not so fast. Deadspin did some very basic fact checking of Te'o's story and started to find some discrepancies. The fact checkers found some very ugly and obvious discrepancies. Like no one had ever seen this Te'o girlfriend. Evidently Te'o had been dating Mr. Snuffleupagus. His girlfriend did not exist.

Notre Dame's Manti Te'o, the stories said, played this season under a terrible burden. A Mormon linebacker who led his Catholic school's football program back to glory, Te'o was whipsawed between personal tragedies along the way. In the span of six hours in September, as Sports Illustrated told it, Te'o learned first of the death of his grandmother, Annette Santiago, and then of the death of his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua. 

Kekua, 22 years old, had been in a serious car accident in California, and then had been diagnosed with leukemia. SI's Pete Thamel described how Te'o would phone her in her hospital room and stay on the line with her as he slept through the night. "Her relatives told him that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice," Thamel wrote.
Upon receiving the news of the two deaths, Te'o went out and led the Fighting Irish to a 20-3 upset of Michigan State, racking up 12 tackles. It was heartbreaking and inspirational. Te'o would appear on ESPN'sCollege GameDay to talk about the letters Kekua had written him during her illness. He would send a heartfelt letter to the parents of a sick child, discussing his experience with disease and grief. The South Bend Tribune wrote an article describing the young couple's fairytale meeting—she, a Stanford student; he, a Notre Dame star—after a football game outside Palo Alto.

Did you enjoy the uplifiting story, the tale of a man who responded to adversity by becoming one of the top players of the game? If so, stop reading.

LINK

I don't know why a grown man felt the need to make up a girlfriend that didn't exist and continue to claim things about her, even after by his own admission, he knew she didn't exist. That makes no sense to me. All I will say for sure that Notre Dame and Te'o are full of crap, as is the entire NCAA system but that's a different story.  I think that both Notre Dame and Te'o knew the value of a good story and decided to roll with it, regardless of whether they came up up with the original con or not. (and I think Te'o did) And all I know is that as a Michigan Man I couldn't be happier to see Notre Dame and Te'o revealed as the lightweight lackadaisical lying lowlife losers I always knew they were. Please read the entire deadspin article and weigh in. 

Questions:

Do you think Te'o is telling the truth about being conned?

Is it possible to fall in love with someone who never existed?

Why would Te'o lie?

Should this give NFL teams pause before drafting him?

NRA Gun Ad Attacking Obama

I don't have any deep analysis here. I just want to know what do you think of this new NRA advertisement. Slate writer Matt Yglesias tweeted that he was
"Pretty comfortable saying that the president’s children are in fact more important than yours"

What do you think?

Louis Seidman: Is the Constitution Outmoded??

After the electoral stomping that President Obama gave to a hapless Mitt Romney as well as the slow transformation of once solidly red states into purple or even blue states, many people on the political left are chafing at limits on Presidential and/or majoritarian power. Whether it's Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow getting their talking points from the White House and dutifully coming out against whatever the "evil Republicans" are doing or immigration rights activists urging the President to meet their goals through executive orders or law school deans jawboning the Supreme Court to not invalidate a law because the President really wanted it, some folks aren't fond of limited government or separation of powers, at least as long as their guy is in charge.

There's an unseemly amount of outrage, among the Right and the Left that the other side is able to thwart their goals by using procedural mechanisms built into our system of governance. This is currently most obvious among the Left but that's just because the Left is politically ascendant while the Right is still slightly better at unified opposition-or at least it was until the fiscal cliff deal.

If you ever took a civics or political science class, you know that we have three co-equal branches of government. The President doesn't get to make law, only enforce it. The courts can interpret but have no enforcement capacity. Congress can withhold money and write law but can't tell the executive branch what to do. So theoretically, each branch can prevent the other two from carrying out unlawful or unconstitutional actions. And human nature being what it is each branch tends to be jealous of its powers and prerogatives. Purely from spite one branch may oppose another branch and limit its options. This rivalry and jealously should work to the citizens' advantage as there is no all powerful centralized government which can create, enforce and interpret law all at once.

That's the theory of our Constitution.


But reality is quite different. There has been, almost from the beginning, a tendency for the President to stretch his authority and break rules. Sometimes there are strong people in Congress and the Courts to, figuratively speaking, throw something high and inside to make the President stop hogging the plate, so to speak. Sometimes, however, there aren't. Often, majorities don't see why they shouldn't win on everything.

There have been increasingly loud mutterings on the Left about getting rid of the Senate filibuster, having the President raise the debt ceiling unilaterally, dropping the electoral college, eliminating the Senate, ignoring the rule that spending bills must start in the House, and urging Presidential executive orders on every hot button issue that twists their knickers. 
Recently Louis Seidman, a Georgetown law professor, wrote that the time had come to junk the Constitution. Unfortunately he didn't say what to replace it with or, in my view, make a cogent argument about why the Constitution was bad. Seidman made the by now obligatory ad hominems that the Founders were long dead white men, had no idea what challenges we faced today, and were often racist slave owners. That's all true and all in the context he was using, completely irrelevant. Those same dead white men also placed freedom of speech and the right to jury trial in the Constitution. It seems a bit, well, difficult to blast something that you don't like as coming from evil white slaveowners and then keep quiet about things you do like but which came from those same evil white slaveowners. 

In the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.

This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.

Nor should we have a debate about, for instance, how long the president’s term should last or whether Congress should consist of two houses. Some matters are better left settled, even if not in exactly the way we favor. Nor, finally, should we have an all-powerful president free to do whatever he wants. Even without constitutional fealty, the president would still be checked by Congress and by the states. There is even something to be said for an elite body like the Supreme Court with the power to impose its views of political morality on the country. If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others to give up their moral and political judgments.

If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian.  If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.

The professor assumes that everyone agrees that the Constitution is preventing progress and must be changed. I don't agree. It's frightening that he thinks the laws and constitutional restrictions against government taking of life, liberty or property should be followed just because we respect them, not because they're the law. We're supposed to have a legal system based in law, not fleeting respect. Respect is an arbitrary thing. As the country becomes ever more diverse it is critical to have baseline rules everyone understands. Seidman gives short shrift to the fact that there is a process both to amend the Constitution and to even start from scratch. The problem from Seidman's pov though, is to do that requires agreement from a wide variety of people with different viewpoints. The results might not be what he was expecting. I think Seidman is high on his own supply. But he may have a point that we need to change some things.

So give it a shot. You are Willy F***** Wonka and this is your chocolate factory! You are King or Queen for a day. The below questions are only examples. Don't let them limit you.

Questions

You and you alone can rewrite the Constitution. What stays or goes?

Free Speech? Commerce Clause? Police Searches? Presidential Authority on War?

Get rid of state authority completely? No private ownership of guns?

Place abortion rights and equal pay for women in the Bill of Rights?

Ignore the rules about being able to confront witnesses at trial?

Allow 15 yr olds to vote? Prevent people on welfare from voting? Have intelligence tests for voting?

Ban all forms of affirmative action? Make hate speech unprotected by First Amendment?

Eliminate standing armies? Get rid of the Federal Reserve?

Music Reviews-Fishbone, Buddy Guy, Wanda Robinson, Keely Smith

Fishbone

Fishbone is a band originally from Los Angeles. They originally all met in junior high and high school. Fishbone is extremely difficult to define. Frantic, exuberant, brash, raucous, happy, eclectic and funky might be a good way to start but that wouldn't be half of it. Fishbone's fundamental building block is probably ska, that Jamaican and Caribbean forerunner to reggae. But although ska themes run through a lot of their work they also make use of punk, metal, alternative hardcore, funk, soul, jazz, reggae, and occasionally a little bit of blues, blues-rock and rock-n-roll just for fun. Lyrically they have a great deal of absurdist and political humor in their music. They're anything but dull. The musical humor reminds me a little bit of Frank Zappa. Outside of Funkadelic I can't think of too many other bands who could do so many different things well. Because Fishbone is so eclectic their early albums have a bit of a roller coaster feel. There aren't necessarily unifying themes. There were numerous songwriters in the band, something else which gave Fishbone a lot of different musical paths and sounds to investigate, sometimes in the same song. There's a little Funkadelic in their sound but they also owe something to musicians like The B-52's, The Untouchables, The Bus Boys, Bad Brains, Fela, The Skatalites , Dead Kennedys, and Led Zeppelin.

I first ran across them in the John Cusack movie Tapeheads, where they were playing a blues/country song "Slow Bus Moving" about busing, interracial sex and the KKK. It was so warped and so unusual for blues material that I decided to look up the rest of the music that they did. Fishbone existed before the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane's Addiction, Extreme, or No Doubt. They influenced all of those bands. Fishbone was quite outspoken about their experiences of music industry racism, something that probably contributed to bad relations with industry insiders.

It is surreal that rock-n-roll was itself primarily started by black people while the most widely acclaimed rock guitarist was a black man but after 1970 or so "rock-n-roll" and "rock" has generally been understood by both blacks and whites to be music that was played and sold to whites. For black musicians working in popular music who didn't necessarily fit an R&B or rap straitjacket, this really limited venues for cultural expression and just as importantly financial remuneration. I've read that the Fishbone members were quite critical of white racists they dealt with as well they should have been. But there is also the other side of the coin: an overly conservative black radio industry that simply won't expose listeners to different sounds. I never heard their music on local radio. So, Fishbone fell between the cracks in terms of trying to build a mass audience. Their often outre styles and sounds also limited their appeal. Fishbone made it okay for black fans to be into punk music, stage diving and the like. In a music industry which tried to pigeonhole black musicians as rappers, neo-classical jazz musicians, or R&B crooners, Fishbone gave all of that the proverbial middle finger. They didn't get a lot of access to either white or black media outlets. Well so it goes. No one owes you anything in this life. Fishbone tried to make up for this with constant touring and incredible musicianship.

There's only so much creativity that we have to share with the world and unfortunately I think Fishbone may have maxed out way back in the mid nineties. Their planned commercial breakthrough albums The Reality of My Surroundings and Give a Monkey a Brain and He'll Swear He's The Center of The Universe were excellent recordings, made more so by the addition of Miles Davis veteran, guitarist John Bigham, to the group. Reality.. is really dense funk while Give a Monkey.. throws the kitchen sink at the listener, opening with the song "Swim", the hardest hardcore this side of Bad Brains or Metallica and closing with gutbucket funk. Both albums were different and heavier than their earlier more ska influenced work but each still had a lot of danceable tunes included. Unfortunately just after Give a Monkey.. was released the band's first guitarist had something of a breakdown and joined a cult. When the bassist tried to "rescue" him on behalf of the band and his family, the guitarist claimed he didn't need rescuing. Kidnapping charges were filed. The bassist was acquitted but that seemingly opened the floodgates for the chaos which plagued the band ever since. 

Various band members left, came back, feuded and left again. The band was repeatedly dropped from record labels. In one case the band was actively trying to get fired. Membership was in constant flux. There were legal situations and other personal issues damaging the band. But they remain a favorite. I wish they would have hit it bigger. I think there are currently just two original members in the band, Angelo Moore (saxophone, lead vocals) and John Norwood Fisher (bass). There is a documentary titled "Everyday Sunshine" which details the ups and downs of the band, as well as some of their legendary live concerts. If you are interested in the band, the documentary is definitely worth it. John Norwood Fisher is among the best modern bassists I've heard. I don't say this about many bands but when Fishbone is on, you could compare them to the JB's...and maybe even the Famous Flames. 

Unyielding Conditioning  Cholly  Movement in the Light  In The Air  Fight the Youth
Freddie's Dead (Curtis Mayfield Cover)   I wish I had a date  Housework   Mighty Long Way  Slow Bus Moving (Howard Beach Party)  Naztee Mayeen  Ma and Pa
Change   Everyday Sunshine  Boning In The Boneyard
Sunless Saturday   Pray to the Junkiemaker  The Warmth of your Breath   Nutt Megalomaniac  Swim  Pouring Rain



Buddy Guy

I discussed Buddy Guy before when reviewing his autobiography. As I mentioned there Buddy Guy is one of the last living name blues guitarists who came up in hard times in the pre-war South. So when he wants to he can summon forth some music that is very difficult for people untrained or unfamiliar in that genre to play correctly or convincingly. If you catch him on a good night he is still, even at his advanced age, one of the best blues guitarists and singers on the planet. However those older more relaxed styles of music which are more jazz and R&B influenced were not and are not super popular or financially rewarding. Since at least the mid seventies or so Guy has spent a lot of time playing in the style of people who were originally imitating him-Clapton, Hendrix, Beck, Page, Stevie Ray Vaughn. I'm not crazy about this but everyone has to eat I guess. Guy has been blunt, not bitter but blunt, about the realities of racism and marketing in the music business. He has been warmly grateful to individual white blues/rock stars who have recorded his music or publicly referenced his work even as he decries the fact that it was and is more difficult for a black musician to reach certain levels of success.

Along with people like Hubert Sumlin, Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Luther Allison, Buddy Guy was one of the earliest Chicago based blues guitarists to bring what we would recognize as a lead guitar sound to the forefront and rework the collective improvisation which had previously defined Chicago blues. He can play slowly of course but compared to people like Albert King Buddy Guy is hyperactive. Buddy Guy counts BB King as an influence.
There are about four, maybe five key periods which define Guy's work. All of them have something ever so slightly different to offer. Throughout his vocals can rarely be described as anything but impassioned. Guy never had the authoritative bass voice of Muddy Waters or the harsh crushed glass sinister baritone sound of Howlin Wolf but Guy puts such a keening sound in his singing voice that it's almost like he's being possessed by something not from this planet. 
In the song "The First Time I Met the Blues" you can hear what I'm talking about. Serendipitously  in that song, he talks about being ridden from tree to tree, which may well be a reference to African and African Diasporic Voodoo religious beliefs, in which the Gods or other spirits may possess or "ride" the initiated. Guy has a very fluid glassy sound on guitar, one that owes a lot to people that came before him but is still instantly identifiable as his own.

Chess and Cobra Records
Buddy Guy was originally a session guitarist for big names like Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howling Wolf, and just about anyone who had his own deal at Chess Records. So if you listen to Chess recordings circa 1955-1960, Buddy Guy was probably playing guitar on about half of them. Once he got a chance to record as a leader he did a lot of wild R&B sounding blues tunes. It is VERY difficult to pinpoint something as blues or soul or R&B on his recordings. Guy mixed all of this up. Not everything here is of the highest sonic quality but "The First Time I Met the Blues" or "My Time After A While" give me shivers.

Vanguard Records
Buddy left Chess Records, displeased with financial improprieties and what he saw as the inability to record the heavier thicker sounds he wanted to produce. He went to Vanguard. Vanguard may or may not have paid Guy better, but the label owner also strongly preferred a cleaner sound. This is my favorite Guy period but it's definitely not Buddy Guy's favorite period. On the other hand he was also touring heavily with his friend Junior Wells, so it's not all bad. Vanguard had pristine recording and production standards. Vanguard was better than Chess in that aspect so the clarity of Guy's work here really stands out. Check out "Mary Had A Little Lamb", "One Room Country Shack", "Money" or "Just Playing My Axe".

JSP Records
After bouncing around a few other companies in the seventies, near the end of that decade Guy recorded a few albums for JSP Records, a company that was almost defiantly interested in roots rock, original blues and country music. Reading the liner notes for JSP albums is sometimes sort of funny as they tend to have a lot of venom, most deserved, some not, towards more popular rock or blues-rock artists. Anyway here I think Buddy Guy finally got to turn up just like he wanted to. Some of the tones on a few albums are indistinguishable from heavy metal. Generally speaking though these albums were mostly aimed at a black blues audience. The song "The Dollar Done Fell' was recorded at Guy's club in front of a very appreciative audience. I am amazed and a little upset by how well those lyrics still fit today's events.

Jive Records
Looking for something different than another album of Chicago Blues, Guy decided to investigate the sounds of North Mississippi blues and of people like Junior Kimbrough and R.L Burnside. This is hill country and quite different from the Mississippi Delta/Louisiana music Guy had previously recorded. It's closer to the styles of blues legend John Lee Hooker, a Guy friend. There are a lot of drones and not many chord changes. It's similar to the modal music done by Miles Davis. Anyway the album that came out, Sweet Tea, was Buddy Guy's biggest hit in a while and sonically redefined what people expected to hear from blues guitarists. The song "Baby Please Don't Leave Me" is 100% sonic testosterone. Women can get pregnant just by listening to it while older men may suddenly discover they have no need for any sort of ED pills. And you should probably run from the woman in "She's got the Devil in Her".

So to summarize there is a reason that Buddy Guy was recently honored at the Kennedy Center. He really is that good. If you enjoy electric blues or rock guitar you should know his work because there's a good chance you've heard someone playing his licks.


Fever I Smell a Rat  Hoodoo Man Blues(With Junior Wells)
The First Time I Met The Blues Red House (Jimi Hendrix cover)  Every girl I see
The Dollar Done Fell  Baby Please Don't Leave Me   
Ten Years Ago (Live with Junior Wells) One Room Country Shack  You Were Wrong   Money(That's What I Want) Mary Had a Little Lamb  
Watermelon Man (Herbie Hancock cover)  Hold That Plane Dedication to T-Bone Walker My Time After A While  Just playing my axe  Thank Me Someday 
She's Got the Devil In Her




Wanda Robinson

I'm not sure if Wanda Robinson plays the guitar but she's just as much of a blues musician as anyone who does. There are some people who believe that black people lost interest in blues and that the blues would have died without white interest. Well maybe. Maybe not. There is a parallel argument which says that blues music, like other musics before it just changed. The stories which would have been told in one way by Bessie Smith or Victoria Spivey in the twenties were being told by Wanda Robinson in a different way in the seventies. The only difference was that Wanda Robinson wasn't trying to dress up and sing like people of years long gone by. In this view Wanda Robinson is just a modern blueswoman. She's a poet who set her work to music. It works equally well as poetry or as lyric. Her backing band, Black Ivory, was equally versed in blues, jazz, soul, funk, etc. Like The Last Poets and The Watts Prophets, Wanda Robinson was the link between the earlier blues and soul of the sixties and the assertive funk and rap of the seventies. I guess you could compare some of her work to later people like Erykah Badu or Jill Scott.

If you're ever depressed, listening to Wanda Robinson's music will probably have one of two effects on you. Either you're gonna listen and realize that no matter how bad you have it you don't have it THAT bad and start to cheer up. Or you're going to listen, get even more depressed and start looking for the sleeping pills. 

Of course it's not all hard luck and bad times. There are some fierce survivalist tunes, some songs of anger and defiance and even a few love songs in her discography. She first came on the scene in the early seventies. Whether she's describing adulterous lovers and closeted gays in "The Meeting Place" or suicide in "The Final Hour" or the end of a love affair in "Parting is Such" everything she wrote was incredibly true to life. She changed her name to Laini Mataka and left the music business. But she has continued to write and educate.

The Meeting Place  The Trouble With Dreams  The Final Hour Tragedy No 456
A Possibility (Back Home) Celebration Compromise Parting is Such..  
John Harvey's Blues  Because They Envy Us



Keely Smith

Keely Smith is one of the more popular jazz and pop singers from the fifties and sixties era. She had been singing since childhood and was a big band fan. She was hired at sixteen as singer for Louis Prima's band and five years later had married him, becoming his fourth wife. They had some hard times professionally. For a while gigs were hard to come by. But they got past that and by 1954 had become a smash hit on the Las Vegas Strip. This led to record deals for Prima and his band but also (at Prima's insistence) a solo record deal for his wife Keely.

This proved to be a wise move by Prima as Keely was an extremely talented singer well versed in jazz and pop. One of her primary influences was Ella Fitzgerald. Like Ella, Keely had a very strong clear voice and a good eye for song material and arrangers. She embarked on a dual track career. With her husband's band she was the straight (wo)man for his jokes, zaniness and lechery. On her own she was a very very good pop and to a lesser extent jazz singer. I REALLY love her version of the jazz/pop standard, "All The Things You Are" which is evidently quite challenging and intriguing to sing or play because of the chord progressions/modulations. And her version of "All the Way" is nothing to turn your nose up at either. She's still alive and musically active.

All The Things You Are That Old Black Magic(duet with Louis Prima)
Autumn Leaves All The Way The Man I Love On The Sunny Side of The Street 
What is this thing called love

HBO Game of Thrones: Stark Children Rap

I found this on a great fan site. Unfortunately the site's comments are dark and full of spoilers so I won't link to it here. Anyway this video is just silliness. Obviously none of the actors involved should give up their day jobs. This is from the commentary track on the upcoming Season Two DVD/Blu-Ray set, which will be released on February 19th.

                             
March 31st is only 79 days away....