brainrow

How do you type that frenzied shriek that a crowd of rabid fans made at a Beatles concert?

My first impression is that it’s “Eeeeeeeeeeee,” with maybe a lot of exclamation points at the end, but that seems rather dull and leaden, somehow, there on the screen. If you look at film of the crowds at those concerts, they’re shouting “John! Paul! George! Ringo! I looove you!” and other things. “Eeeeeeeeeeee” doesn’t really do it justice.

At Bruce Springsteen concerts, people shout “Bruuuuce!” and it sounds like they’re booing. Now, that must have taken some time to get used to. If his audience ever turns against him, Bruce won’t know until he sees incoming rotten tomatoes and other produce.

“Aiiieeeeee” has some energy, but it sounds like something a guy would say as his still-beating heart is plucked from his chest in an Indiana Jones movie — there is a strong negative vibe that doesn’t really work for the Beatles’ fan sound. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” as repeated by ten thousand screaming teenagers might actually be close, but it just looks silly there in type.

“Aaaarrrggghhh!” — well, that’s not even close, is it? “Eeeeeeyaaaaa!” looks promising, but it seems kind of hostile. This is harder than it looks.

Aw, heck. I’m gonna go with my original instinct.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Kate Bush is finally releasing a new album! After twelve years! Eeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

I guess this news is almost six months old, but I just heard about it. Eeeeeeee!!!

Kate Bush, if you’re not familiar with her work — eeeee!!! — is a singer/songwriter from England. She was phenomenally popular in Europe during the 1980s and early 1990s. She gained a cult following in the United States, and I was one of the cult.

I first heard her on December 9, 1978 — eeee!! — on Saturday Night Live. She must have made some sort of impression — eee! — because it was more than two years before I heard her again, on December 17, 1980, and I remembered her name and the title of one of her songs. I put a Kate Bush page on my cobweb site (it’s old and dusty, see, because it hasn’t been updated for a long time) and told the story of how I got hooked on the music of Kate Bush.

In the years since Kate went silent, I sorrowfully searched for other singers to take her place. I found Sarah McLachlan and Loreena McKennitt and Sinéad O’Connor and Tori Amos and the Roches and others, all wonderful. But I’ve always hoped to hear more from Kate Bush. Now, at long last, my wish may come true. Wooooohoooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

“Wooooohoooooo” is pretty good.

Harry Shearer on modern whistleblowers:

Ever heard of Greg Thielmann? He should be at least as famous as W. Mark Felt by now. A few stories about him surfaced during the time it mattered, the runup to the war, when he, and his British and Australian colleagues (Dr. Brian Jones and Andrew Willkie) tried to alert us all to the falsity of the intel on which the invasion was based. Their experiences raise the question: what if a whistleblower risks his all to warn his countrymen, and nobody listens? Deep Throat would have been useless without a Deep Ear.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert says reminders of Watergate have come at a good time:

The trauma of Watergate, which brought down a president who seemed pathologically compelled to deceive, came toward the end of that extended exercise in governmental folly and deceit, Vietnam. Taken together, these two disasters, both of which shook the nation, provided a case study in how citizens should view their government: with extreme skepticism.

Trust, said Ronald Reagan, but verify.

Now, with George W. Bush in charge, the nation is mired in yet another tragic period marked by incompetence, duplicity, bad faith and outright lies coming once again from the very top of the government. Just last month we had the disclosure of a previously secret British government memorandum that offered further confirmation that the American public and the world were spoon-fed bogus information by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

President Bush, as we know, wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action. With that in mind, the memo damningly explained, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

That’s the kind of deceit that was in play as American men and women were suiting up and marching off to combat at the president’s command. Mr. Bush wanted war, and he got it. Many thousands have died as a result.

From the PERRspectives blog:

Which brings to the Bush White House. Thirty years after Nixon’s resignation, the Bush team is waging a more subtle and successful war against the media. The most paranoid, secretive and vengeful White House since Nixon has sought to create its own news reality through bogus science, fake news, fake reporters, staged events and scripted interviews. Retribution against leakers, whistle-blowers, and objective truth itself is certain, swift and severe. Just ask General Shinseki, Paul O’Neil, Richard Clarke, Richard Foster or Joseph Wilson.

In the wake of the Newsweek fiasco, the uproar over the Amnesty International report, and the unending revelations from Guantanamo Bay, the Bush White House attacks the messenger, just as Nixon did 30 years ago. Scott McClellan argued, “This was a report based on a single anonymous source that could not substantiate the allegation that was made. The report has had serious consequences.” And an “outraged” President Bush merely said the allegations came from “people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report”.

Robert F. Kennedy once famously said, “Richard Nixon represents the dark side of the American spirit.” Well, RFK never met George W. Bush.

In today’s Washington Post, Bob Woodward tells How Mark Felt Became ‘Deep Throat’:

In the course of this and other discussions, I was somewhat apologetic for plaguing him and being such a nag, but I explained that we had nowhere else to turn. Carl and I had obtained a list of everyone who worked for Nixon’s reelection committee and were frequently going out into the night knocking on the doors of these people to try to interview them. I explained to Felt that we were getting lots of doors slammed in our faces. There also were lots of frightened looks. I was frustrated.

Felt said I should not worry about pushing him. He had done his time as a street agent, interviewing people. The FBI, like the press, had to rely on voluntary cooperation. Most people wanted to help the FBI, but the FBI knew about rejection. Felt perhaps tolerated my aggressiveness and pushy approach because he had been the same way himself when he was younger, once talking his way into an interview with Hoover and telling him of his ambition to become a special agent in charge of an FBI field office.

It was an unusual message, emphatically encouraging me to get in his face.

Is W. Mark Felt, AKA Deep Throat, a hero or a villain?

The Daily Show examined the question, and pretty much nailed the answer:

G. Gordon Liddy: If Mark Felt was Deep Throat, he’s no hero.

Pat Buchanan: I think what he did is deeply dishonorable. It’s shameful.

Robert Novak: He was one of the worst of J. Edgar Hoover’s toadies.

Daily Show anchorman Jon Stewart: Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak and Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy don’t like Mark Felt. Mark Felt is truly a great man.

I was all over Watergate.

I read the newspaper stories. I watched the Senate Watergate Committee hearings and heard Sam Ervin warn John Ehrlichman that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” I followed the House Judiciary Committee hearings considering Articles of Impeachment against President Richard Nixon.

When Nixon resigned, I taped his speech by putting my cassette recorder’s microphone right in front of the TV’s tiny speaker. The sound was tinny, but the tape captured the sound of car horns honking in celebration outside my apartment.

I even took a bus to Washington, D.C., and sat in Judge John Sirica’s courtroom through the second day of the Watergate trial of H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and several others.

I read many Watergate books. It’s been about thirty years since I read All the President’s Men. All the time I was reading the book, I was trying to figure out the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s “deep background” informant from inside the government. Reading the book’s account of one particular meeting between Woodward and Deep Throat, I felt a sudden certainty: I knew who Deep Throat was. It was so obvious, I thought Woodward and his co-author Carl Bernstein were being awfully careless with the anonymity of their secret source.

Through the years, I noted the many lists that folks compiled of people who were suspected of being Deep Throat. A few mentioned the man I knew to be Deep Throat, but most of them brushed past him quickly to dwell on other candidates. I would read the lists and smile quietly. I knew for certain that Deep Throat was FBI Director L. Patrick Gray.

I’m going to be drummed out of the Psychics’ Union for this. Not for being wrong, but for admitting it.

Pat Buchanan was sometimes on the lists of suspects. Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown, he said he knew none of the White House aides on the list could be Deep Throat, because Richard Nixon had helped each of them advance their careers. Apparently they were more loyal to Nixon than to the law. Not too surprising in the Nixon White House.

Had she lived, Marilyn Monroe would be 79 years old today.

This quote is attributed to her:

Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

Recommended: The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot and The Misfits. The first two are brilliant comedies. The Misfits is not a comedy. Marilyn is extraordinarily good in all three. She had talent.