The Sweet, Sweet '70s, Part 1: The Funk.

At Thanksgiving, we were playing Apples 2 Apples, the party game where people choose nouns that should match an adjective the judge randomly selects. When I was judge the first time, the word was sweet, and among the nouns I had to choose from was "The 1970s". It was among the final nouns I was thinking of choosing, when one of the other players said, "The 70s weren't sweet. The 60s were sweet."

Allow me to retort.

Music in the 1970s underwent several interesting revolutions. One of the problems was that music was heading off in so many directions that you couldn't hear nearly everything just listening to one radio station the way you could in the 1960s, and some great artists weren't getting much radio play at all. But there was amazing stuff going on, even if young people weren't in 100% agreement about it.

This first set of ten songs explores the directions soul music took in the decade, both the smooth and the rough.

Let's Get It On Marvin Gaye
The Motown business model of a band of singers backed by unnamed musicians and songwriters who weren't performing artists was not working as well in the 1970s. Fortunately for the label, they had two superstars who wrote their own tunes and had their careers expand in the new decade, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. While Marvin famously got political in some songs, sometimes you have to sing about the sweet, sweet love, and no one did it like Marvin Gaye.

I Want You Back The Jackson Five
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Very few bands in history had as good a debut single as I Want You Back. This song is a throwback to the Motown 1960s style, where the band is just singers, the true musicians are hidden and the songwriters nearly anonymous. But when that first hook hits on the bassline, none of that matters. I Want You Back is as great a pop song as has ever been recorded.

For The Love Of Money The O'Jays
The Motown business model of offstage stars wasn't dead yet, and in the 1970s the greatest off-stage stars were Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the songwriting and production team behind the stars at Philadelphia International Records, known by most as just The Philly Soul sound. Whether it was The O'Jays or Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes or Billy Paul, it was Gamble and Huff behind the scenes, and they had the magic touch.

Get Up Offa That Thing James Brown
Okay, here is someone who is not behind the scenes. Mr. James Brown was first tabbed by producers back in the 1950s as the next Jackie Wilson, but he didn't have anything like Wilson's vocal range. What he did have was excitement and talent and revolutionary ways of tearing the music down and building it back up again. Listen as he calls out K.C. and the Sunshine Band and The Ohio Players in this song. They were hitmakers, but they were not the Godfather, and they never would be.

That would be Mr. Dynamite, The Hardest Working Man In Show Business, the man who brought you Get Up Offa That Thing... Mr. James Brown.

Come And Get Your Love Redbone
Redbone is a local nickname for people with both Chicano and Native American heritage and the band Redbone was formed by two brothers of that ethnicity, Patrick and Lolly Vasquez. This was their only Top Ten hit, but their name will live forever.

The World Is A Ghetto War
This is a brilliant slow groove, with wonderful harmonies and dynamics, but it hits hard with the central message.

Don't you know, that it's true
That for me and for you
The World Is A Ghetto.

Time Tough Toots & the Maytals
By the 1970s, the funk had traveled around the world and was coming back to America in new forms, including reggae. Bob Marley was the great ambassador, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Toots Hibbert and his band the Maytals, and this simple groove.

The Hustle Van McCoy
Disco gets a bad rap for a lot of the silliness of the 1970s, but tell me that bass and drums aren't doing their jobs?

Lady Marmalade LaBelle
And when you say bad things about disco, aren't you saying bad things about Miss Patti LaBelle?

You know you shouldn't do that, because you know it's wrong.

You know you shouldn't do it because I will hunt you down and find you.

Say nothing bad about Miss Patti.


Tell Me Something Good Chaka Khan and Rufus
There are many Khans through history. There's Genghis and Kublai. There's Nusrat Fateh Ali. Back in the middle of the 20th Century, the best squash player in the world had the last name Khan for a few generations.

Then there's Chaka Khan, who bestrides all Khans like the mighty colossus she is.

The Khans are a proud people and they might not accept this judgment.

What
What she's
What she's got
What she's got will
What she's got will knock
What she's got will knock your
What she's got will knock your PRIDE
What she's got will knock your pride aside.


Tomorrow: The Sweet, Sweet '70s rock out.
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Combat!

Last month, I was in San Francisco on an errand, getting a favor from blog buddy Mike Strickland of Civic Center, and after we took care of the errand we went to a nice little restaurant for lunch. We were talking about this and that, and I brought up that I was going watch some early episodes of Kojak just to see how they held up. Mike recommended that if I wanted to watch an old TV series, I should try the first season of Combat! I was a little surprised at the recommendation, but in the first season, nearly one third of the episodes were directed by Robert Altman, so I put the discs on my Netflix list and soon enough they began arriving in the mail.


Combat! is not a well-remembered show for many. Some people my age or even older do not recall it, and because it was only sporadically shown in re-runs, friends younger than I am aren't even aware of its existence. It aired on ABC in the early 1960's, when that was the third most important network out of three. The show lasted five seasons and had 156 episodes.

The person most connected to the show in people's minds is Vic Morrow, who played Sgt. Saunders. Morrow's first screen role was in The Blackboard Jungle, the 1950's movie about juvenile delinquents. After that, he did a lot of movie and TV work, and Combat! was his next big break.

Not to be cruel to the rest of the cast, but Morrow really does stand out. As Robert Altman put it, "Vic gave great exhaust." His character's main two emotions were haunted and dead tired. Of all the rest of the cast, the only guy for me who is really believable as a front line infantryman is Dick Peabody as Pvt. Littlejohn.

Sadly, Vic Morrow is best remembered today for dying on the set of The Twilight Zone Movie, killed in a scene when a helicopter crashed. Another piece of trivia I didn't know about Morrow until doing the research for this post is that he is the father of Jennifer Jason Leigh.


Rick Jason was the other star of the show, playing Lt. Hanley. In an unusual move, the credits each week were different. Sometimes it said "Starring Rick Jason and Vic Morrow" and other times it was "Starring Vic Morrow and Rick Jason". While Morrow was by no means ugly, Rick Jason was the kind of tall, dark and handsome actor who often gets stuck in soap operas. There are shows where Lt. Hanley gets a special assignment away from the rest of the cast, and not all these special assignments are particularly believable. Jason did as well as he could with the material, but in general, the episodes that focus on Hanley aren't as good as the ones that focus on Saunders.


For a trivia buff like me, a lot of the fun is in the guest stars and bit players that show up, people you know from movies and other TV shows. In the first season, there were single episode appearances by Keenan Wynn and Tab Hunter, while there were uncredited actors who actually got lines like Walter Koenig and Tom Skerritt. Altman hired his buddy Ted Knight to play German soldiers in several episodes because Knight actually spoke some German.

The biggest surprise for me was that in the first season, comedian Shecky Greene was a semi-regular, playing the goldbrick Braddock. The episode that guest starred Wynn and featured Koenig and Skerritt was actually a showcase for Shecky Greene.

Altman was fired at the end of the first season for making an episode the network considered too bleak. Shecky quit because he couldn't afford the hobby of a network TV show when he was pulling down $150,000 a week in Vegas.

I'm enjoying the first season of Combat! The shows are pretty well written, the Altman episodes always have a few camera shots that are much better than you would expect on a network TV show and there are often guest stars and cameos you might recall from 1960's shows that are better remembered now, like The Twilight Zone or Star Trek. If your Netflix list is getting low, give the first season of Combat! a try.
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Being thankful.

For a lot of people, this is going to be a scaled back Thanksgiving, and likely a scaled back holiday season in general. Counting your blessings may be a shorter list than it was a year or two ago. But here's one thing I'm thankful for.

For the first time this century, the clown with the fake turkey who liked to dress up like a soldier is not the President of the United States, and that is a very good thing.

I'm also thankful I'm not Barack Obama. He's got the hardest job in the world even under normal circumstances, and these aren't normal circumstances. He came into office with a major financial crash and two wars that aren't going to be "won" by any traditional definition of that word. People are either whining about what he's doing or whining about what he's not doing, and he doesn't have a cheering section the way George W. Bush had Fox News and the idiot end of the conservative wing of the party.

That said, some of the greatest presidents got dealt the worst hands when they stepped into office. Lincoln's election was the last straw that started the Civil War, but the seeds of it had been growing for decades. F.D.R. came into office with The Great Depression already underway, and he really didn't solve it until World War II began. Truman had the end of the war to deal with, though it was nearly over and we were the only ones with The Bomb, Eisenhower had to fix the mess in Korea. On the minus side, both L.B.J.'s and Nixon's legacies are marred by the eventual bad end to Vietnam, a war that was already underway when they took their respective oaths of office, though L.B.J. gets plenty of the blame for turning it into a major fiasco.

Best wishes to all my friends and family this holiday, and to all my readers out their in blogland. Here's hoping for a great long weekend and better days ahead.
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Wednesday Math, Vol. 98: Patterns in the prime numbers

You may recall from a long ago math class that a prime is a positive whole number greater than 1 that can only be evenly divided by itself and 1. In older math books, 1 was listed as a prime, but at some time in the 20th Century it was decided that 1 was a special case and it was called a unit and would be separate from the primes. This means 2 is the smallest prime number and the only even prime number, since every other even number is divisible by 2.

If we divide an odd number by 4, the remainder will either be 1 or 3. This means any odd number must either be of the form 4k+1 or 4k+3. Here are the starts of the two lists on the positive side.

4k+1 = {1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 25, 29, 33, 37, ...}
4k+3 = {3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 23, 27, 31, 35, 39, ...}

Any prime number bigger than 2 has to be in one of these two lists. The early primes on the two lists are marked in bold and red. There has been a proof that there are infinitely many primes since the time of Euclid. It's a more recent proof that there are infinitely many primes in each of our subcategories 4k+1 and 4k+3.

The primes show up somewhat randomly. There are long stretches of consecutive numbers that contain no primes and there are also many instances of two consecutive odd numbers both being prime, like 29 and 31 or 41 and 43. These pairs are called twin primes. It is still unknown if there are infinitely many pairs of twin primes.

Here's an unusual fact about the primes of the form 4k+1. All of them can be written as the sum of two perfect squares. Here are some early examples.

5 = 4+1 = 2^2 + 1^2
13 = 9+4 = 3^2 + 2^2
17 = 16+1 = 4^2 + 1^2
29 = 25+4 = 5^2 + 2^2

Notice that this isn't true for any old number of the form 4k+1. 21 is not the sum of two perfect squares, while 25, which isn't prime, is 3^2 + 4^2 = 9 + 16. So it's hit and miss if the number isn't prime, but it works every time with the 4k+1 primes. Fermat made the statement of the theorem back in the 1600's, but gave no proof. The first proof written down in the 1700's was by My Favorite Lenny, Leonhard Euler. It's just crazy how many things in math were first done by Euler. His proof was complicated and some simpler proofs, or at least shorter ones, have been proved since.

Next week: Something we don't know about the primes.
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Happy trails, Carl!

You may have already heard through less reliable news sources that Carl Kasell, the newsreader on Morning Edition for the past thirty years, has decided to retire from that job. Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do has done the legwork, and these preliminary reports are in fact true.

Mr. Kasell is now 75 years old and has earned his rest.

Answering the next most important question, Carl is NOT retiring from his job as announcer on Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me. When that happens, it's a sign of the apocalypse.

Stay tuned for further details.

And, oh, by the way, Mr. Kasell... all us faceless listeners out in radioland love you and wish you the best.
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Coming soon to a theater near you.

This Sunday, I went out to see Pirate Radio with a gaggle of family and friends. The movie itself was light and entertaining (more on that later this week), but two of the most memorable moments of the afternoon were two very different movie trailers.

A documentary from France called Babies is scheduled to be released early next year. While I have no idea how good the whole film will be, the coming attraction was absolutely amazing. It's like a high end nature documentary, but instead of pointing the camera at penguins or meerkats or sharks, the camera is aimed at four babies from around the world and the camera just rolls. In the trailer, there was no voiceover and minimal musical cues. You just watch one of four babies doing what babies do. From what I've read online, the trailer premiered during showings of Where The Wild Things Are and made a huge splash. Director Thomas Balmès finished this film in 2008 and it took a while for him to get a worldwide distribution deal, but this has a real chance to be the sleeper indie movie hit of 2010.

If the ninety minute version has an emotional pull as strong as the three minute trailer, it will trigger maternal instincts in anyone who watches it.

This movie could make Chuck Norris lactate.


So what does an audience who just spent three minutes oohing and ahhing at babies want to see next? How about the bleakest post-apocalyptic nightmare ever?

Also showing on Sunday afternoon was the trailer for The Road, a film based on the book by Cormac McCarthy and starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and Robert Duvall. Several actors from HBO series are also featured, including Molly Parker and Garret Dillahunt from Deadwood and Michael K. Williams from The Wire. There is a lot of buzz about this movie and the release was timed for Oscar consideration.

The film answers the question, just how bad will the post-apocalyptic world be? Will it be like The Road Warrior or A Boy And His Dog or The Day After? The answer is no, it won't be nearly as cheerful or upbeat as those movies.

After watching this three minutes of hopeless violence and senseless cruelty, I turned to my friend Jodi and said, "Yeah, there going to be showing this as a double bill with Babies."*

*More in the first comment.
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Fantasy football update - week 11

I'll admit it. Mistakes were made. By people who I know personally.

Technically, by people who live in my one room apartment, if you want to get picky.

Nearly every decision I made this week was wrong. With the exception of Jacoby Jones, a player I benched who actually got zero points, anyone I had on my bench would have been an improvement on any person I put in the game. Right now, my two no-brainers are QB Tom Brady and RB Thomas Jones. Past the Two Toms, it's a bunch of coin tosses and I got them all wrong.

And, oh yeah, the Mutant Mercenaries still won by a comfortable margin. This is what happens when you play the worst team in the league.

This week was a bellwether for my blood relatives. For the first time this season in the eleventh week, my brother and my nephew and I all won our games. Yay! My brother whipped his future daughter-in-law and my nephew won in the last two minutes of the last game of the week due to a strong performance from running back Chris Johnson in the closest game of the week, with the second best team in the league beating the third best.

Yay, blood relatives! Yay, me!

I am currently in the final playoff spot, and the teams that trail are at least one game behind with only two games left. If I win both games, I'm in. Anything else and my fate is very uncertain.

Ooh, exciting!
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False alarms and close shaves.

The process of assigning classes for the next semester is almost at an end. With the shrinking budget, the people with tenure and on tenure track get first dibs, and those of us who are adjuncts get to fight for the scraps. When the assignments first came out, I was given one 5 unit class. The cut-off for getting a deal on health insurance is 6 units. I went into squeaky wheel mode, and was rewarded with another 3 unit class, bringing my total to 8. It's not perfect, it doesn't cover my expenses, but it's a start, and given the budget mess, it's as good as I can expect.

I got my official assignment letter in the mail on Saturday. One 3 unit class. I sent off an e-mail to the department chair asking if the 5 unit class promised to me had been canceled or given to someone else. I got an e-mail reply early Monday morning that this was a clerical error and I'm supposed to teach 8 units this next term, barring either of my classes not having enough enrollment.

So I dodged a bullet and nothing worse happened to me than spending a Sunday in a foul mood, but others are in the position of just 3 units or just 5 units next term. If, like me, they don't have any work at another school, they seriously have to look at the option of going on unemployment instead. At 3 units, I would be making about $200 a week before taxes. I can double that on unemployment, so even at 5 units, weighing the option of unemployment instead of employment would still be in effect. I'm not sure the penny wise and pound foolish Republicans realize that all these teachers on the public payroll that are being squeezed out will still be cashing checks from the state without the state getting any work out of them.

I can agree with the wisdom of a super majority to pass a budget bill, but a two-thirds super majority is insane. If something isn't done to bring it down to 55% or so, California will remain ungovernable for the foreseeable future.
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Random 10+1, 11/22/09

China Girl David Bowie
Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy Glen Hansard
Your Mind Is On Vacation Mose Allison
Family Snapshot Peter Gabriel
My Freeze Ray Neil Patrick Harris
Chi Vuol La Zingarella (Paisiello) Cecilia Bartoli
Ain't Misbehavin' Fats Waller
Get On The Good Foot James Brown
Three Little Maids From School Are We Shirley Henderson, Dorothy Atkinson and Cathy Sara
Your Good Thing (Is About To End) Mable John
Special bonus track and video:
Walking the Dog Rufus Thomas

Okay, this is random! Also, it's a little weird to get Family Snapshot from Peter Gabriel on a November 22, but there you are and that's why this is the picture I included. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is still running through my head months after I first heard it, and so I'm happy NPH shows up to sing the first song. (The sub-title for my blog is a lyric from So They Say, the song that opens the third act.) And this list is all over the place. David Bowie, Mose Allison, Cecilia Bartoli, Fats Waller, James Brown and Gilbert and Sullivan. Where else do you get a Random 10 like this?

I'll tell you, hypothetical question asker. No place else.



It was a little disappointing that Mable John's version of Your Good Thing (Is About To End) wasn't up on The You Tubes, so I went for one song more and PAYDIRT! The Rufus Thomas video is so stunning, I embedded it instead of making you click on it to go The You Tubes. Nobody but Rufus Thomas could possibly wear that outfit. It's amazing!

Have a good Sunday.
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