Bill Ayers: America's Most Dangerous Man

Hahahahahaha...oh, sorry, you caught me chuckling at the computer again. Throughout the entire election we heard from Hillary Clinton and John McCain surrogates that Barack Obama was some kind of dangerous radical because he once attended a dinner party also attended by Bill Ayers. Ayers and his wife were active members of the Weather Underground, a dunderheaded militant '60s organization whose bombs kept going off when beat cops and night watchmen were in shrapnel distance. Seriously, if the Weatherman Underground was a terrorist organization, than Hezbollah is the second world superpower.

I retained some mild curiousity about Ayers, especially since unlike Rev. Wright, he seemed to want to live his old life out of the spotlight. Two days ago while covering Obama's polling location, an elementary school, the New Yorker's editor David Remnick went with a colleague across the street to meet Bill Ayers and take the above picture.

THAT guy is dangerous?!! Remnick says he has both ears pierced and is wearing that RIDICULOUS T-shirt. On the day Obama is elected. Of all days. And he's an education professor wearing that shirt across from an inner-city ELEMENTARY school?!

AAAAHHHHH!!!!! Seriously, the shuttle is ready, baby-boomers. It has all the seasons of West Wing and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It has all the C,S, & N albums. Your last representative for the White House has been defeated. You can check out. Thanks for the '70's and twenty years of conservative bullshit. Now board the shuttle and you can enjoy the last few months of your life before you fly into the sun.

There. I just solved the Social Security crisis.

Next election, can we find a real dangerous dude, and not somebody who embarasses every sentient liberal on the planet with his attire?

Ahmet Ertegun and the Music We Love

Ahmet Ertegun died last year. You may have heard it in the news, and seen a picture of someone who looked like a '70s retread. Well, that man had as much to do with inventing rock n' roll as any performer. Ahmet co-founded and ran Atlantic Records, the most successful independent record label of all time. He recorded Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin. Later his label released records by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin.

The New Yorker's George W. S. Trow wrote a marvelous profile of Ahmet in 1978. If you love rock music like Shambollocks does, you need to read this piece. It carries a bit of the publication's snootiness, but gives a crystalline vision of what it meant to be in rock in the '70s, when the coolness faded and money became paramount.

The record business is not, in its essence, picturesque. The processes of the work are straightforward, and while it is true that behind the scenes there are several coherent styles in operation, these styles (the style of engineers of twenty-seven or thirty-four with long hair and a nose for drugs; the style of press agents of twenty-seven or thirty-four with one small item of Vuitton and a nose for drugs; the style implied by stencilled T-shirts and access to rented limousines) lack the air of ingenious contrivance that was formerly found in the movie industry, for instance. There was about the old movie industry a feeling that adolescents—adolescent actors and adolescent moguls—were dressing up to play-act as adults. The superior candor of the record business has resulted in a formal recognition of adolescent styles. Styles that must be a little jittery, however, since they are juxtaposed with the real work of a cutthroat business.

If you wanted to know why the Ramones saved rock n' roll, read this article.