Pete's Pantheon: Jay Hammond, The Oracle of Lake Clark

 

Before the Republican party became the last refuge for opportunists, fools, knaves and scoundrels, there were some GOP giants whom you could proudly vote for. Leading that list was the rugged and charismatic Jay Hammond.  Wally Hickel came up with a jingle called "Alaska Man" to get himself elected in his last race for the office of Governor.  Jay didn't need a jingle like that because everybody already knew he was a Bush-pilotin', wood splittin', homesteadin', WWII Marine.

Hammond was narrowly elected in his second run for Governor, squeaking by Wally in the primary with the thinnest of margins. He and his running mate, Lowell Thomas Jr, had the temerity to run without disavowing conservationism. This hurt them seriously, especially in the Alaska GOP of the time. No GOP candidate would consider this in Alaska today, and, now that I think of it, it would make him a fringe candidate as a Democrat.

He will be remembered in the long run mainly for the Alaska Permanent Fund. When I worked at the Anchorage Daily News, it was a constant source of wonder and amazement to  see how many politicians came in and took credit for the fund. But if you could run a test on it, you'd find mostly the Bush-pilotin', wood splittin', homesteadin', WWII Marine DNA of Jay Hammond.

Even after leaving office, Hammond stayed involved with statewide issues such as the future of the Permanent Fund and the solution to the subsistence hunting impasse. He regularly wrote for the Anchorage Daily News from the Olympian reaches of his remote homestead. He was so constantly courted and cited by Alaska politicians that an irritated Tony Knowles referred to him as "The Oracle of Lake Clark".

I ran into him at a friend's house shortly before he died. He recited poetry, talked politics and told me my cartoons were making a difference. Who was I to argue? The oracle had spoken.

Pete's Pantheon: Thorstein Veblen, Wry Hedgehog

Isaiah Berlin, the British diplomat and philosopher, is celebrated for separating thinkers into two groups. The first group is foxes, the second, hedgehogs. Foxes know many things; hedgehogs know one big thing. If ever anyone fit the hedgehog category, it was Norwegian-American economist and anthropologist Thorstein Veblen.

Veblen's big idea was propounded in a small, wry book first published in 1899, "The Theory of the Leisure Class". His notion was that the actions of humans across the world are driven primarily by an urge to display their superiority by demonstrating their economic clout through the showing off of  wealth. The more wasteful and frivolous an activity, the more it shows how much you can afford to throw away. He called this "Conspicuous Consumption". He goes on to explain darn near anything anyone does in terms of his great idea, and makes quite a case.

Why do suburbanites own SUVs to drive to the grocery store? They are expensive gas hogs, and thus confer status. Why do we buy McMansions with three car garages, jacuzzis and opulent kitchens, and payments that slowly crush us? Veblen knows. Your boat, your vacation, your membership in the gym? It's all about the bling, baby.

Veblen finds replications of this behavior across time and culture. It crosses lines of class and race.  If Veblen were alive today, he would not find us difficult to recognize or understand. Foxes or Hedgehogs, we're all too human.

Pete's Pantheon: John Sayles, Empathy's Witness

Like a string that vibrates in sympathy with other strings, John Sayles creates art from his deep ability to resonate with the emotion, thoughts and speech of others. His stories are testaments of faith in the decency of the individual, out of sync with the vulgarity and cynicism prevalent in popular culture. A frequent theme is the human capacity to choose what is right, and to act for the common good in spite of a world that, to paraphrase Werner Herzog, sets each against the other and God against all.

Sayles has managed to follow his muse, subsidizing his own films by working as a Hollywood script doctor. Yes, the man who wrote and directed "Matewan" was the guy who breathed life into "Pirhana 3-D". He has succeeded for decades outside the Hollywood system, making the movies he wants to make. That alone would certify him as worthy of the MacArthur "Genius" grant which Sayles won in 1983.

The Sayles point of view is captured in his short story "The Halfway Diner" He employs dramatic irony brilliantly to create suspense as we wonder how a busload of women on their monthly trip to visit their men in prison will be affected by events that occur at the prison as they make their journey. The women come to life for the reader as they forge fragile alliances and share common burdens. Thanks to Sayles' ear for the way people talk and his ability to conjure flesh and blood from ink on paper, the reader takes that bus trip along with the other passengers.

The "The Halfway Diner" was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1998, When Sayles gave a reading of the story in Anchorage, he recounted how when he got the galleys, the editors had changed his punctuation throughout the piece. He threatened to withdraw it, and the editors put it back the way he originally submitted it and published it. When the National Magazine awards rolled around the Atlantic submitted the story and won a prize- for editing. A nifty little John Sayles story in itself.

Pete's Pantheon: Professor Longhair, Polyrhythmically Perverse

Henry Roeland Byrd is a fine name. But if you want to be the Zulu King of New Orleans piano players, you need a name with a little more je ne sais quois to compete with the likes of Jellyroll and Fats. Somewhere, Henry came up with the name  Professor Longhair. It captures his brainy and wild approach to music neatly.

'Fess, in fact, seems to have had two brains. One for his left hand to boogie and chug with, and the other for his right hand to spin glorious arabesques of melody that loop and skitter, contrasting and converging with the bass lines with a dexterity and invention that satisfies and delights. His buoyant Rhumba/Jazz/Blues music combines logic and surprise in a way that reminds more than one listener of Bach.

The wildness in his music, accentuated by the weird yelps and yodels of his singing style, seems to have limited his appeal outside of New Orleans. But he is the hometown hero that players like Dr. John and Allen Toussaint look up to.  A long way up.

Pete's Pantheon: Tom Waits, American Orpheus

Tom Waits has always had more imagination than he knew what to do with. In the seventies he imagined a drunken beat poet alternate reality to the tough-but-sensitive singer songwriter milieu of his Southern California surroundings. Even so he beat them at their own game with songs like "Old 55" and "San Diego Serenade". It was music that most of his contemporaries would have traded their souls to the Devil for, if only he wanted them. Songs Waits today repudiates.

In the early eighties Waits was getting bored with the romantic drunk shtick and was looking for a way forward. Every album had contained great songs, vivid characters and imagery, but the context was becoming repetitive and confining. Nietzsche's Hell was eternal recurrence, and Waits had been there long enough. 

Then he met his collaborator and wife-to-be Kathleen Brennan. Brennan challenged him to head out cross-country. Waits and Brennan began to write songs that incorporated everything from American folk song, Country, and Blues, to the European art song of Kurt Weill, to the sound of circus bands. The glass harp, the musical saw and strange percussion instruments devised  and played by Waits made their way onto albums that, starting with Swordfishtrombones, Waits produced himself.

Much of what follows is nightmare, as Waits and notable collaborators like percussionist Michael Blair and guitarist Mark Ribot clang and thrash with a menace that echo the desperation of Waits famous rasp of a voice. This would get old in the hands of a musician with less empthy, (Beefheart, anyone?) but Waits is willing to remind us of why it matters. The horror of "In the Colosseum" is countered by the hope of love, bent, but unbroken in "Downtown Train".

Both strains come together in his great anti-war song "The Day After Tomorrow" It's not an anthem,  it's a quiet letter from someone who has seen too much too soon.  Waits makes  the character real with lines like "What I miss you won't believe, shoveling snow and raking leaves". The writer still clings to life in spite of what he's done "We just do what we are told, we're just the gravel on the road", and what service in the war has cost. "And I know we too are made of all the things that we have lost, dear." he sings, and... ahh, but what are you doing listening to me? Go listen to Tom.

Pete's Pantheon: Martin Carthy, Discovering the Funk Deep in the Soul of British Folk Music.

If Martin Carthy's music never existed, I'm convinced that I would be haunted by a feeling that the world was missing something. His playing seems like a fundamental part of the Universe, like gravity.

Who is Martin Carthy? Only the guy who taught Paul Simon to play "Scarborough Fair".  The guy whom Bob Dylan tapped for his knowledge of British Ballads. The guy from whom Johnny Marr said he cribbed guitar lines,  merely speeding them up. Michael Hedges and Pierre Bensusan have praised him and worked elements of his playing into their approaches.

Carthy has an uncanny ability to carve away everything inessential from a song. His sense of time is exquisite. He plays the silences as well as the notes. His brilliant and bold use of dissonance and modal scales, combined with his unique percussive guitar transfixed me since I first heard him in the late 1970's. Somehow Carthy discovered the funk deep in the soul of British Folk Music.

He applies the same ruthless genius to his accompaniments for other musicians, creating lines that interact and enhance others melodies with subtle invention. He builds in tension and releases it at the last instant, infusing drama where so many others can't even imagine it.

In addition to his playing and singing, he has been a collector and restorer of damaged or fragmented songs. With the fine eye of a diamond carver, he will fit a husk of an old song with a new tune, add carefully chosen words, and bring it alive, widening the repertoire.

I've learned over time that some people just don't get Martin Carthy and are happy to do without his music. I could do that. Right before I give up breathing.

Pete's Pantheon: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, God's Gift to Rock and Roll

Midway through the French movie "Amelie",  archival footage rolls across the screen of a gospel performer who is tearing the roof off the studio.  She and a choir have perfected what is, if not the first sound of Rock and Roll, at least one of its earliest incarnations. Then the woman digs her thumbpick into the strings of her white Gibson SG and plays leads that smoke off the fretboard while she moves like Pete Townshend in full manic fury. Who the Hell was that? Who else but Sister Rosetta Tharpe?

Rock and Roll, like the Blues, gets most interesting when the sacred smacks up against the profane. Sister Rosetta (1915-1973) was playing Gospel music on stage from the time she was four. By the time she was a young woman she, unlike most other Gospel performers, was as happy to play the Cotton Club as a church down the street. The money was better, and besides, she might reach a sinner there who wouldn't show at church.

She was well-known in her heyday, played with Benny Goodman, toured Europe, and was featured in the first of John Hammond's famous "Spirituals to Swing" concerts. Johnny Cash said she was his favorite singer. Mention her today and be prepared for blank stares. But turn on your radio, and she is there whether you know it or not. She took the Church into the barrooms with full revival joy and intensity. You can call it what you want, it sure sounds like Rock and Roll to me.
(Hat tip to Wikipedia)

Pete's Pantheon: Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, More Accomplished Than You

It's fun to imagine the profile of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) on Linkedin...

Skills: Linguist (speak almost 30 languages), ethnologist, explorer, cartographer, author, translator, swordsman, spy, soldier, diplomat


Experience: Traveled extensively in India, Africa, United States, South America, Face pierced by javelin thrown by Somali warrior in coastal skirmish, barely escaped with life, (Scars plainly visible still). Came down with malaria while leading expedition seeking the source of the Nile, was among the very first Westerners to visit the Islamic holy cities of Medina and Mecca, where disguised as an Afghan, I measured and sketched the Ka'aba. Worked the world over as a diplomat for Her Majesty, the Queen of England, knighted for services to Queen and country. Published too many books to list here including first Western unexpurgated version of "The Arabian Nights" and the sexual how-to from India "The Kama Sutra". Was also the basis for two characters in the writing of Rudyard Kipling. British consul in several hemispheres including stints in Damascus and Trieste.

References: Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone

Pete's Pantheon: The Impassive Passion of Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton broke into show business the hard way. His role in the family Vaudeville act, starting from the age of three, was to be kicked and thrown around the stage by his father. He bore this treatment with his trademark lack of expression that earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".

Keaton wrote and directed his own films, performed his own stunts, and broke his own neck doing them. He moved with a physical grace that elevated slapstick to poetry. Working within the restrictions of the soundless, colorless world of silent film, he voluntarily limited himself further by giving up the actor's cues of expression to the audience. His silent face, like the silence of his films, invites the audience to fill the gaps with their own imagination.


There is something of Job in Keaton. He endures the absurd punishments of life with an unshakeable faith. The scenery might chew him, but he never chews the scenery. The question is never whether he might endure, but how.

Pete's Pantheon: Antonio Gaudi and the Undulating Apartment Building

Like a mad dog or an Englishman, you are wandering the sun-blasted streets of the Mediterranean City of Barcelona. You are slightly lost, quite sleep deprived, and looking for something. As you round a corner, suddenly you know you've found it. A large apartment building swims into view from several blocks away. It bulges and flows with rhythmic grace, pinioned in place by the handsome but boring buildings that surround it. It is "The Pedrera" an apartment designed by the great Spanish Architect Antonio Gaudi.

It would be more accurate to call him a Catalan Architect, He lived and worked almost entirely in the area of Barcelona from his birth in 1852 to his death in 1926. His distinctive architectural style was an homage to his region, Catalonia, that overlaps the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and France. His buildings celebrate regional fauna and flora, incorporating them into the decoration and shapes of the buildings themselves. Although he was a part of the Modernista movement his work is distinctive. He often built without detailed blueprints and modeled stress and force in his buildings through complex mockups using weighted strings. What he could have done with present techniques and materials we can only wonder.

His unfinished masterpiece is The Sagrada Familia Cathedral. It was begun in 1883, Gaudi devoted himself exclusively to it in 1915, and it remains unfinished to this day. The building as it exists now still sums up his devotion to Catalonia, Catholicism and Architecture. Shot through with the natural history of the area from the tree trunk columns inside to the turtles and snails decorating the outside, Gaudi was building a house for God.  Shortly before his death, his absorption with the project led him to move on site. On his way to confession months after moving, he was run down by a tram, mistaken for an indigent, and finally recognized too late for any intervention.

He is now seen the World over as a unique genius. His work draws visitors from around the planet to see buildings that seem to have grown from up out of the soil to beckon their inhabitants. A house for God, and houses for men.   (Thanks to Wikipedia, Robert Hughes)

Pete's Pantheon: Hedy LaMarr, Dangerous mind

Where to begin with the sad and wonderful life of Hedy Lamarr? She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1913, the daughter of assimilated Jews in Freud's Vienna. Lamarr grew up to be one of the most beautiful women of her time and probably all time. How does a woman cope with all the pressures that such status imposes? She had a hobby. Sewing? Drinking? No. She was an inventor.

She became a star in European movies as a teenager, shocking the world with nude scenes in the movie "Ecstasy". Married at 19 to an arms manufacturer (Fritz Mandl, also of Jewish descent) who isolated her in their mansion and kept tabs on her by having her accompany him to meetings with technical staff and unsavory business partners. It was during these meetings that she made her first acquaintance with military technology. Her husband entertained lavishly and stupidly. Guests at his opulent soirees included Benito Mussolini and a certain Adolph Hitler. Important customers, no doubt, but problematic for obvious reasons.

Hedy escaped to America, either by dressing as her maid, or drugging and eluding her maid. Whom should she meet on the boat going over but movie mogul Louis B. Mayer? Hollywood, next stop.

She pursued her hobby of inventing while making movies Like "Algiers" and "The White Cargo".  It was during this time that she came up with her breakthrough. In collaboration with her neighbor, George Antheil, an avant garde composer and writer of film scores, Lamarr received a patent for an early form of radio frequency-hopping .

The two arranged a demonstration for the Navy pitching the invention as an unjammable way of guiding torpedoes.  The Navy laughed at the pair, mocking the idea that their creation, which used player-piano technology would be able to withstand battle.  They suggested she could be more useful to the War effort by selling War Bonds. She took that on, selling seven million dollars worth at one event according to Wikipedia.

Hollywood has no use for aging actresses. That sad fact and botched plastic surgery sent her career into decline. Hedy exiled herself to isolation in Florida, where she died in 2000. Her frequency-hopping idea is the basis today for wireless networking like Bluetooth and Wi-fi.

Pete's Pantheon: Bertrand Russell, an extended correction

It has come to the attention of the editors at Frozen Grin, that the earlier post about Bertrand Russell was riddled with fancy, whimsey, and outright fabrications. A new and corrected version of the item appears below. The editors not only regret the errors, but also the fact that they weren't true, two slightly different things.

 OK, corrected version follows... Starting with the image, this was clearly photoshopped, a more representative photo appears above. Now as to the story itself, The best approach when dealing with a breach of reality this enormous is to go through line by line and correct as we go. Ready? Here goes...

 Most people know of Lord Bertrand Russell, mathematician, social philosopher, Nobel Laureate, and conscientious objector to World War One. But few remember Bertrand Russell, Rock Pioneer. (Few remember this because it is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit. While the amazing Russell was in fact a gifted mathematician, a prominent social philosopher, a conscientious objector during the first World War who was imprisoned for his stand, and later a Nobel Laureate in Literature, he does not appear to have been a pioneer rocker) In fact, he led the first electric band composed entirely of Cambridge University academics. The band, Lord Bertie and the Don Patrol, was in fact the first known power trio. With Ludwig "Magister Ludie" Wittgenstein on bass and Karl Popper on the skins, the band had a foundation that few had seen the like of, and fewer could tolerate. Lord Russell sang and played a mean telecaster. It's now in the British Museum. (While all three philosophers mentioned here were at Cambridge, they were never in a band together.) Their visionary first album "Principia Rock and Rolla" actually made it to the British Charts on the strength of their hot single "Epistemology of Love". Unfortunately their second album "Illogically Positive About You" was shelved unfinished after Popper and Wittgenstein quarreled. (Again, no such band, hence no albums, no singles.) Popper accused Wittgenstein of being unable to keep a beat, to which Wittgenstein bitterly retorted "How am I supposed to keep time, when it is really a illusion created by our inability to experience all of reality at once?" At this Popper hit him with a drumstick, leading to the infamous attack on Popper by Wittgenstein using a fire poker from the faculty lounge in the Philosophy department. (It seems fairly well established that Wittgenstein did threaten Popper with a fire poker in the Cambridge faculty quarters, however the dispute seems to have been over some obscure, yet obviously important philosophic argument). Needless to say, bootlegs of the never-released second album have surfaced and been very influential. (No such album ever existed, so don't bug me for my copy so you can burn your own.) Eric Clapton praised Russell's playing for its "Warm singing tone, not at all academic.", and Keith Moon is said to have dropped Popper's name often, saying "If he could make it as a drummer, obviously anyone could." (again the music never existed, so theses quotes are obviously bogus.) The breakup of the band left Russell even more uncertain of the long-term survival of humanity. His journal of the time contains pages filled with angst in which he wonders "If philosophers can't co-exist as a band, what hope is there for the masses?" (No band, no breakup. Russell had plenty of reason to fear for the future of humanity, but this was not among them.) He got his answer shortly after when the Beatles, in an unprovoked act of aggression, invaded America.

Pete's Pantheon: Rockin' Bertie Russell

Most people know of Lord Bertrand Russell, mathematician, social philosopher, Nobel Laureate, and conscientious objector to World War One. But few remember Bertrand Russell, Rock Pioneer. In fact, he led the first electric band composed entirely of Cambridge University academics. The band, Lord Bertie and the Don Patrol, was in fact the first known power trio. With Ludwig "Magister Ludie" Wittgenstein on bass and Karl Popper on the skins, the band had a foundation that few had seen the like of, and fewer could tolerate. Lord Russell sang and played a mean telecaster. (It's now in the British Museum.) Their visionary first album "Principia Rock and Rolla" actually made it to the British Charts on the strength of their hot single "Epistemology of Love". Unfortunately their second album "Illogically Positive About You" was shelved unfinished after Popper and Wittgenstein quarreled. Popper accused Wittgenstein of being unable to keep a beat, to which Wittgenstein bitterly retorted "How am I supposed to keep time, when it is really an illusion created by our inability to experience all of reality at once?" At this Popper hit him with a drumstick, leading to the infamous attack on Popper by Wittgenstein using a fire poker from the faculty lounge in the Philosophy department. Needless to say, bootlegs of the never-released second album have surfaced and been very influential. Eric Clapton praised Russell's playing for its "Warm singing tone, not at all academic." and Keith Moon is said to have dropped Popper's name often, saying "If he could make it as a drummer, obviously anyone could." The breakup of the band left Russell even more uncertain of the long-term survival of humanity. His journal of the time contains pages filled with angst in which he wonders "If philosophers can't co-exist as a band, what hope is there for the masses?" He got his answer shortly after when the Beatles, in an unprovoked act of aggression, invaded America.

Limbaugh, From Bad to Perverse

Pete's Pantheon: Chris Whitley, Sacred and Profane

From the time of his spectral first U.S. release "Living With The Law" Chris Whitley seemed to consort with ghosts. His singing frequently leaped up in the midst of a phrase into an eerie falsetto that recalled the great Delta bluseman Skip James. His chosen instrument was the metal-bodied dobro a nearly extinct artifact of the pre-amplification era of music. The instrument came to life at the caress of his slide and cried and whined in a way it only does for a gifted few. His songs tended toward a private world, artfully suggested more than directly spoken, embodying the old blues tension between the holy and the profane. He was always the next big thing, and numbered Dave Matthews and Bruce Springsteen among his admirers.(On his early acoustic demo of "Countin' on A Miracle" you can hear Bruce channeling Whitley.) When Whitley came in October of 2004 to play in Anchorage, he looked like a man with one foot in the grave, haggard and thin as a whip, but he sang with fervid beauty. In a year he was dead of lung cancer. "At the border town they shook my hand, Was the gateway to some other land. Now the border town is the great divide, is a gateway to some other side."

Pete's Pantheon: Jazz Phoenix Django Reinhardt

Django, his name is a verb, the Romany word for "I awake" He and his foil, the violinist Stephane Grappelli were the first European Swing musicians to be taken seriously by the American Jazz aristocracy. Their band, The Quintette of the Hot Club of France, swung with a jaunty sparkle and phenomenal virtuosity between WWI and WWII. Django spilled melody out in ferocious runs in spite of the fact that he had maimed his hand in a fire which left him with essentially two fingers to fret with. He retaught himself to play and reached a level of mastery that enabled him to survive in occupied Paris despite his Romany heritage and his stardom in a field of music condemned by the Nazis. If you want a parable for the redemptive power of art, look no further. If you want to hear music that is passionate, melodic and elegant they still play Jazz Manouche in Paris, where it has outlasted the Nazis by half a century and counting.

Petes Pantheon: The Rugged Joy of Allen Toussaint

When Allen Toussaint performs, it seems that all of American popular music has floated down the Missisippi to his hometown of New Orleans and fetched up in his piano. Jazz and RnB flow elegantly into the songs of Paul Simon and Steve Goodman. As a singer, songwriter and producer, his creative powers have fueled the recordings of everyone from Irma Thomas to the Rolling Stones. The man wrote "Working in a Coal Mine" and arranged many of the horn parts for the Band's Last Waltz . His graceful piano playing seems effortless, steeped in local tradition, and tinged with a rugged joy. His quiet stage presence will disarm you right before the funk grips you and the indestructible music of New Orleans knocks the rust right off your soul.

Pete's Pantheon: He Writes! He Teaches! He Honks! He Screeches! Mr. Don Byron!

It would be a sorrier, drabber world without the music smarts of clarinettist Don Byron. Who else could expose "Danke Shoen" as a music industry vaccine against authentic world music, a vaccine made of a dead or weakened strain of real music? Who else would transcribe the complex compositions of Micky Katz, assemble a crack team of downtown noisemakers and reproduce the bygone brilliance of that forgotten Klezmer Dybbuk? Who else would find the link between Raymond Scott, John Kirby and Duke Ellington, and illustrate his point using an episode of the Flintstones? And just to tie things up in a neat bow, Who else has the chops to be a repeat winner as best clarinettist in the Downbeat Reader's Poll? He writes! he teaches! He honks! He screeches! Give it up for Don Byron!

Pete's Pantheon: Marc Ribot, "The Boris Karloff of the Guitar"

What do the likes of Elvis Costello, T-bone Burnett and Tom Waits do when they want a guitar player? They take a cue from Solomon Burke, and call on Marc Ribot. Waits calls him "The Boris Karloff of the guitar" for the many identities he can assume with supernatural ease. But he has his own unmistakable voice, a ferocious attack with moments of faux awkwardness that caused him to be misread and underestimated by many. Including me. The first time I heard him was on the Waits classic Raindogs. I was repulsed by his squawks and staggering jabs of melody. But like some of the characters Karloff played he can get a hold on you and never let go.