"family values" - the great UNequalizer

Illegitimate Complaints - New York Times:

The sordid details surrounding the battle over Dannielynn have led many people to wish that we could revive traditional family values and re-establish marriage as the central institution for organizing sexual relationships and child-rearing. But as usual, the lessons of history are more complex. The fact that Dannielynn has a right to inherit from either of her parents is the result of legal processes that have undermined the role of marriage in determining people’s economic and social rights. Surely this change is a welcome corrective to the injustice of traditional marriage laws and family values that stigmatized “bastards” for life.

It’s not as if the old laws of marriage and the old family values stopped people from engaging in sordid sexual liaisons; they merely swept the casualties under the rug. When the future President Grover Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child with a department store clerk, he arranged to have his son taken from her by force and adopted by another family. When the mother objected, Cleveland had her committed to an insane asylum. And the African-American mother of Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate child, a former maid in his parents’ house, never exposed Thurmond’s racist hypocrisy, but instead made do with whatever gifts he offered.

The Anna Nicole Smith story may be distasteful. But it hardly represents a more depraved morality than the “dignified silence” that surrounded deviations from the family values and marriage customs of the past.

our national values ARE money

Generally, an acceptable summary of the great inaction of the current government on the immigration issue, 'til it got to this section:

They Are America - New York Times:

The bureaucratic trap. The federal bureaucracy, notorious for backlogs and bad service, wants to charge more to immigrants who want to become Americans — an average increase of 66 percent in the price of visas and citizenship papers. Such steep and arbitrary increases would create a means test for citizenship, an affront to our national values.

Uh, how long has it been since money and means WEREN'T our "national values".  When the $20 holds more value than a vote, when constitutional doctrines like limited copyright get sold away to the lobby of Disney, when civil rights justice is won by the highest paid lawyer, when our cultural output is judged solely by the ratings, the box office, the billboard charts...

"almighty dollar", indeed.

<sarcasm>Making money a requirement for citizenship merely tells the immigrant, "get with the program."</sarcasm>

Today's AT40

2/27/1988.

Didn't start out well: #40 is Terrence Trent Darby.  I hated that guy.

Senior in high school.  I was hating most pop at the time, given that I was hitting my peak of "classic rock" worship.  Earlier that season I'd seen Pink Floyd, Yes, and Rush in concert.  My preferred "party" music was more goth-techno, but since I didn't hold too many parties I didn't bother to get my own until much later.

In spite of the dearth of "pop culture", this was actually the best time of my high school life, really.  Rather than overstriving with too many AP classes, I took it easy in physics with a non-AP/non-GT class (aced easily), and a cool English teacher who introduced me to a James Burke, and to a fantastic production of Taming of the Shrew that I recently found was available on DVD (we watched it a few nights ago).  Yes, THAT Mark Singer.  I was doing well in my calc class, and I took a "teachers assistant" spot for my lunch class session that occasionally made for 90 minute lunch breaks, doing wonders to my sanity.

(whew...firefox crashed but recovered this post when i restarted it.)

Anyways, a few rock classics for what passed for modern rock at the time, Aerosmith's Angel (wow, Liv Tyler before being famous), INXS's Devil Inside, ...

All good songs, just not what I was into at the time, mostly because of how much crap ("Pebbles", or Jody Watley, for example) you had to go through on pop radio before a good song came up.  It just wasn't worth the wait.

HAH - story, Springsteen once forgot the lyrics to Born to Run in concert in 1980, and then was able to go on with the concert 'cause all 13,000 fans were singing it for him.  Tunnel of Love (the song in today's chart), on the other hand, was a song I didn't care for at all, but you Bruce fans can keep it.

more updates later.  laundry time.

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"Long time ago when we was Fab..." -- Now, of course, I know what he means.

Such a change in attitude to today.  Back then, "Girlfriend" by Pebbles was a song about one girl telling the other not to give in to the boy's sexual advances.  Today, "Girlfriend" is a total slut saying "don't you wish your girlfriend would put out like me" in no uncertain terms.  Subtlety is lost on the modern generation.

What do you do when you (as a woman) walk out into your living room and see two guys sleeping on the floor?  Start a band!  The (not so) sordid origins of Swing out Sister. English pop still had something going for it, between them, Pet Shop Boys, and Rick Astley.

"Get out of my dreams, get into my pants"!  Sorry, Mr. Ocean, but you just made that WAY too easy.

Michael Bolton's cover of Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay. "Why should I have to change my name?  He's the one who sucks!"

Histeria!

I hated that album at the time, merely because everybody else loved it.  By '91, after the hype had *finally* died down, I could listen to it objectively and I think it's brilliant.  My HD at college my freshman year had "HSTERIA" for his license plates.  They got stolen.  He found out the hard way that if custom plates are stolen, you couldn't use the same custom tag again for your replacements.

Sting, Be Still My Beating Heart.  Another song I respected long after the album's popularity had dwindled.  I was very turned off by "We'll Be Together" (still am) that I wasn't willing to risk the rest yet.  It's a very dark, mature album, and most of it is really lost on 18 year olds who dug the music but probably didn't really know what he was saying, especially in They Dance Alone or Englishman in New York.

Yeesh, Gladys Knight and the Pips still had a hit that late in the game?  Not terribly good (typical hip-hop dance for the time), though apparently it won a Grammy that year.  I wonder if someone's made a t-shirt featuring her cousins that just says "Respect My Pips!"

Cher's big 80s hit, "I Found Someone", was actually a cover of a Laura Branigan song from 1986.  Go fig.  Based on the snippet, I'll take the late Branigan's version instead.  Ironically, it was written by Mr. Sucks himself, Michael Bolton.

#1?  George Michael's Father Figure.  Didn't care for it then, don't care for it now.

just sign here, please...

Robert Fripp's Diary:

Our lawyer has suggested to us it would be difficult to overthrow a contract on the basis of (demonstrable) incompetence because, if incompetence were sufficient cause for contracts to be voided, no record contract could be considered safe. What! Dear innocent reader, please read the preceding sentence again.