In the middle of this week, we got the word that Glenn Frey, too, had passed away.
It’s been a rough January.
Glenn Frey and That Peaceful, Queasy Feeling
BY SARAH LARSON
JANUARY 19, 2016If you’re American and have been near an FM radio in the past few decades, you likely have strong feelings—love, affection, or the opposite—about the Eagles, whose founding member Glenn Frey died yesterday, at age sixty-seven, in New York. Frey and Don Henley wrote snootfuls of harmony-rich sunny-California easy-vibe megahits in the seventies, selling more than a hundred and fifty million Eagles records; after they broke up, in 1980, the songs just stuck around. Turn on a classic-rock station, and somebody’s bound to be taking it to the limit or standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. They were everywhere, like Budweiser or Heinz ketchup, agreeable to everybody except to those who scoffed at them. On “60 Minutes” a few years ago, Don Henley, when asked to explain the band’s enduring popularity, answered, “ ‘Take It Easy,’ ‘Witchy Woman,’ ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling,’ ‘Desperado,’ ‘Tequila Sunrise,’ ‘Already Gone,’ ‘Best of My Love,’ ‘One of These Nights,’ ‘Lyin’ Eyes,’ ‘Take It to the Limit,’ ‘Hotel California,’ ‘Life in the Fast Lane,’ ‘New Kid in Town,’ ‘I Can’t Tell You Why,’ ‘The Long Run,’ ‘Heartache Tonight.’ ” Yes, we know. These songs have simply been around us, like the air we breathe, in our cars, in our grocery stores, at our sporting events, in our uncles’ tape collections, in the pages of Rolling Stone, in our rock-block weekends, forever.
There are times when you can’t escape them—particularly “Hotel California.” If you dislike “Hotel California,” that feeling, that panicky urge during its first, ominous notes to prevent it from doing its full ridiculous thing—warm smell of colitas, mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice—can produce an intense physical reaction. One night, years ago, around 4 A.M., my friend Andrew was asleep in bed, and his neighbors across the air shaft, bartenders who came home late ready to party, started to blast “Hotel California” about five feet from his head. He awoke to those first notes, tentative and foreboding, and the next thing he knew that dark desert highway was coming into his bedroom. Enraged, he opened his screen and, Plastic Man-like, extended his torso into and across the air shaft, positioning his face in front of his neighbors’ screen. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. (This is not like him.)
“Is that a face?” he heard someone say. They turned it the fuck off. He retracted himself and closed the window.
Not long after he told me this, I was driving through Holyoke, Massachusetts, in the fog, and I made a wrong turn. The moment I realized I was lost—fog floating mysteriously around the road and trees—“Hotel California” came on my car radio. I laughed, enjoying the absurdity of it through the interminable guitar intro. As I got my bearings, some fog drifted a little, revealing a sign for the I-91 on-ramp, and the drums kicked in. “On a dark desert highway!” Don Henley sang. I laughed again. It’s likely that you, and many people you know, have also had a ridiculous experience with “Hotel California,” which heightens things you don’t want heightened, showing up with its bloated sense of itself at inopportune moments, demanding that you reckon with it, à la “Stairway to Heaven” or “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but irking you with its portentousness at the same time. This is simply part of living in the United States.
Glenn Frey, primarily, wrote those creepy “Hotel California” lyrics; he was also the band’s charged-up taskmaster, co-writing the songs, pushing his band toward perfection and commercial success and ever more golden harmonies. If you’re not a fan, that “Hotel California” feeling, that jumpy angst its opening notes provides, signalling the operatic kitsch to come, can come to represent your entire feeling about the Eagles. But most of their songs are perfectly fine. They have beautiful harmonies, pleasant melodies, and anodyne lyrics. They sing of highways, taking it easy, taking it to the limit, feeling easy, crazy hazy nights, life in the fast lane, and women—lovers or friends, witchy or with lyin’ eyes. To my ears, the Eagles’ music, with its too-canny approach to mellowing out and vaguely sleazeoid approach to women, feels disingenuous and wrong, like all things Jimmy Buffett. (I believe that those parrotheads are having a good time in Margaritaville, but it’s not my kind of good time.) Yet within that skepticism, I accept and appreciate the Eagles’ place in our world; they are part of our shared experience, whether we owned their albums or not.
Read the rest of the tribute at the link above.
By Frey’s own admission – this is his favorite song
Snoop was asked to #apologize about his comments on the #oscars #lol [explicit language]
[facebook url="https://www.facebook.com/19apdta/videos/972364286167336/" /]
Sorry I missed much of the day’s action fam, but it was one of those days where duty called and I had to give my incredibly pouty, spoilt guy all of my attention..
I promise to make up for it – and to follow up on my hastily posted comments from yesterday that ended up missing punchlines of my rather long and incomplete arguments .. My frustrated mind was zipping faster than I typed..and I ended up omitting the key points I was trying to make about double standards and all..
Anyhow, I just stopped by to say hello and stay warm fam – and to share this spot-on review that uncannily mirrored my thoughts and take-away once I saw stills and brief preview of the movie about the Obamas – SouthSide with you..
In reading about it, I see that the actress Tika Sumpter produced and helped get the movie made and wanted to play young FLOTUS’. But I think she wasn’t quite right casting. Another actress with more depth – even an unknown – would have done a much better job. Unfortunately, the valley girl sound isn’t FLOTUS and sounds flimsy, and the overacting from the brief clip I saw, comes across contrived – and nothing like the serious, no-nonsense, whip-smart, unpretentious, focused and grounded young lady who was recruited straight out Law school by the prestigious Law firm in her hometown, and who moved back home to help pay the bills and help her mother care for her ailing and physically impaired father who would be dead in 2 years… An only daughter who loved and idolized her father, who was completely spoilt and babied by him in return…
Parker Sawyers on the other hand, is mostly unknown actor…I’ve been impressed with what he’s done in bit parts in other movies I’ve seen him in…He’s deliberate.. a studied actor with pretty good acting instincts..
I’ll still see the movie whenever it’s released just because…but this review so aptly captured my initial impression of it…
“…Tanne had the good smarts to cast newcomer Parker Sawyers to play young Barack, a difficult job that Sawyers proves wholly adept at handling. He doesn’t do an impersonation, but he does nail certain familiar cadences, especially in a centerpiece speech at a community meeting, when Michelle first gets a glimpse of Barack’s preternatural rhetorical abilities. Sawyers knows when to play cocky, when to be a little goofy, and, most crucially, when to turn on the sex appeal. It’s easy to understand why Michelle, who is initially resistant to the idea that this is a date, is ultimately powerless to resist.
But we already knew about Barack Obama’s uncanny charisma. What Southside With You’s premise more tantalizingly offers is a chance to get to know Michelle, to see her intellect and ambition before her identity is forever tethered to Barack’s. It’s unfortunate, then, that Tanne has written her so stiltedly, a problem that carries over into Tika Sumpter’s performance, which finds some piquant moments but hits too many awkward notes to hold its own against Sawyers’s fluid ease. We don’t really learn much about Michelle Robinson; ultimately she exists in the film as simply yet another person captivated by Barack Obama’s famous magnetism….”
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/01/southside-with-you-obama-review
https://twitter.com/Zok82/status/691276885884588032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
RACISTS football FANS heads are exploding
GO CAM & PANTHERS!Quarterback Cam Newton led the Carolina Panthers to a win of 49-15 over the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship Game.
https://twitter.com/rjoseph7777/status/526250126331744256?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
RACISTS football FANS heads are exploding
GO CAM & PANTHERS!
Hasselback & Cardinals are NO MATCH for the Panthers
I want the Zonies to lose. The Panthers deserve this, they had a great season.
Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination
TA-NEHISI COATES 6:48 PM ET
Last week I critiqued Bernie Sanders for dismissing reparations specifically, and for offering up a series of moderate anti-racist solutions, in general. Some felt it was unfair to single out Sanders given that, on reparations, Sanders’s chief opponent Hillary Clinton holds the same position.
…
Here is the great challenge of liberal policy in America: We now know that for every dollar of wealth white families have, black families have a nickel. We know that being middle class does not immunize black families from exploitation in the way that it immunizes white families. We know that black families making $100,000 a year tend to live in the same kind of neighborhoods as white families making $30,000 a year. We know that in a city like Chicago, the wealthiest black neighborhood has an incarceration rate many times worse than the poorest white neighborhood. This is not a class divide, but a racist divide. Mainstream liberal policy proposes to address this divide without actually targeting it, to solve a problem through category error. That a mainstream Democrat like Hillary Clinton embraces mainstream liberal policy is unsurprising. Clinton has no interest in expanding the Overton window. She simply hopes to slide through it.
But I thought #FeelTheBern meant something more than this. I thought that Bernie Sanders, the candidate of single-payer health insurance, of the dissolution of big banks, of free higher education, was interested both in being elected and in advancing the debate beyond his own candidacy. I thought the importance of Sanders’s call for free tuition at public universities lay not just in telling citizens that which is actually workable, but in showing them that which we must struggle to make workable. I thought Sanders’s campaign might remind Americans that what is imminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same things, and while actualizing the former we can’t lose sight of the latter.
A Democratic candidate who offers class-based remedies to address racist plunder because that is what is imminently doable, because all we have are bandages, is doing the best he can. A Democratic candidate who claims that such remedies are sufficient, who makes a virtue of bandaging, has forgotten the world that should, and must, be. Effectively he answers the trenchant problem of white supremacy by claiming “something something socialism, and then a miracle occurs.”
…
… “Hillary Clinton is against reparations, too” does not differ from, “What about black on black crime?” That Clinton doesn’t support reparations is an actual problem, much like high murder rates in black communities are actual problems. But neither of these are actual answers to the questions being asked. It is not wrong to ask about high murder rates in black communities. But when the question is furnished as an answer for police violence, it is evasion. It is not wrong to ask why mainstream Democrats don’t support reparations. But when the question is asked to defend a radical Democrat’s lack of support, it is avoidance.
The need for so many (although not all) of Sanders’s supporters to deflect the question, to speak of Hillary Clinton instead of directly assessing whether Sanders’s position is consistent, intelligent, and moral hints at something terrible and unsaid. The terribleness is this: To destroy white supremacy we must commit ourselves to the promotion of unpopular policy. To commit ourselves solely to the promotion of popular policy means making peace with white supremacy.
If we can be inspired to directly address class in such radical ways, why should we allow our imaginative powers end there?
But hope still lies in the imagined thing. Liberals have dared to believe in the seemingly impossible—a socialist presiding over the most capitalist nation to ever exist. If the liberal imagination is so grand as to assert this new American reality, why when confronting racism, presumably a mere adjunct of class, should it suddenly come up shaky? Is shy incrementalism really the lesson of this fortuitous outburst of Vermont radicalism? Or is it that constraining the political imagination, too, constrains the possible? If we can be inspired to directly address class in such radical ways, why should we allow our imaginative powers end there?
These and other questions were recently put to Sanders. His answer was underwhelming. It does not have to be this way. One could imagine a candidate asserting the worth of reparations, the worth of John Conyers HR-40, while also correctly noting the present lack of working coalition. What should be unimaginable is defaulting to the standard of Clintonism, of “Yes, but she’s against it, too.” A left radicalism that fails to debate its own standards, that counsels misdirection, that preaches avoidance, is really just a radicalism of convenience.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-liberal-imagination/425022/
I don’t know, but I think TNC has got his head in the clouds on this one. We’re talking about the Democratic nominee, the upcoming Democratic primaries. An informed person who consistently votes, who thinks that voting is important, will scrutinize the candidates in the same lab and under the same microscope. If what Bernie said about reparations is disturbing, not what you want to hear, then you will look at what the other candidate(s) have said on the same subject. That is the way people who actually think about these things decide who to vote for. They vote for the candidate who is most in alignment with their own values and beliefs. There can be other factors, of course, such as electability considerations, single overriding issues (such as war), and so on. And for that matter, “most in alignment” may not even be close. We have very limited choices.
I just don’t see the “what about black on black crime” comparison here. That is an evasive response given by people who do not care about black victims of crime to begin with. It is meaningless.
TNC, Capehart & nem are seeing the writing on the wall. Their money’s on Clinton, and they are positioning themselves for a place-setting cOmplete with SHRIMP COCKTAILS’!
Ha ha. Well, I’ll miss the old TNC.
When TNC starts critiquing CLINTON & O’MALLEY,….
Just saying
Well, that’s it. I don’t know if anyone has asked O’Malley, but I daresay that none of the candidates support reparations. I would be very surprised if any of them have given much thought to the subject. Being disappointed in one candidate that you had higher hopes for should not make one of the others your default choice, and I realize that isn’t really what TNC is saying. But he should know that intelligent voters ask the same questions of all the candidates. Otherwise, we would be low information voters who decide at the last minute and base that decision on some unverified bullsh!t we just heard.
HA HA HA Tom Brady’s face is about as DEFLATED as those FOOTBALLS he used to have DEFLATED
KARMA BITCHES!
Not today, Tom Brady
TEE HEE HEE
BWA HA HA HA HA AH
Come with it, CAROLINA PANTHERS. Let’s win the NFC championship and take a switch to the Bronchos
Can someone tell me how Hillary understands what this picture means?
https://twitter.com/BmoreDoc/status/691385955329163266
https://twitter.com/BmoreDoc/status/691382887464198144
GOOD GRIEF The lengths these folks won’t go to, to ingratiate themselves, CO-OP Black people’s experiences,significant, HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
A head rub of a BLACK POTUS by a little black boy,
YES HILLARY UNDERSTANDS IT ALRIGHT
i can’t with this FUCKERY
Dude is black. I can’t with these negroes.
I know SG2. The COONTASTIC SHOW is in town for the Clintons.
What next? Hillary knows what it’s like to be Black in America?
Ha ha, she was the first black First Lady, wasn’t she?
I’m NOT a fan of Tom Brady or Peyton Manning.
But I don’t want TOM BRADY in another Superbowl
Agreed!
I want Denver to win today and lose the Superbowl.
Liza; You’re INSIDE my HEAD.
https://twitter.com/3ChicsPolitico/status/691343444426432512
phuck.outta.here.
https://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow/status/691265455261143040?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
MAJOR BUSH FAIL
it would be safer to slide on a lunchroom tray down those stairs.
https://twitter.com/raju/status/691031932520513537?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Whoa!
uh uh uh
uh uh uh
How it feels to be a poor mother living without heat during a blizzard
By Terrence McCoy January 23 at 6:54 PM
At the end of a row of abandoned homes in one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods, it’s 7:30 a.m., and Chamika McLaughlin climbs out of bed. She dreads this time of day. It’s when she has to make a choice between two terrible options.
Does she stay cold? Or does she put her life at risk?
McLaughlin pulls on a blue hat, wraps a black sweater around her slight frame and pads into the kitchen. Hands tucked in her armpits, she shivers in the early-morning chill. School is canceled today, and her 12-year-old son, sleeping in one of the apartment’s two bedrooms, will soon awake. She has to get the house warmer. So, as she’s done countless times over two heatless winters in this apartment, she reaches for the oven dial.
McLaughlin, 30, knows heating her home this way could start a fire — oven blazes kill people every year. But she feels she didn’t have a choice. She’s marooned with defective radiators in one of the worst blizzards to hit the District in years. McLaughlin turns the oven to 400 degrees, pulls down its door and watches the coils inside glow red.
“I just open it up and let it heat up the living room,” says McLaughlin, who’s bought space heaters for the bedrooms.
NAILED IT.
This has been going on in HOLLYWOOD FOREVER & A DAY.
It is a white male dominated enterprise, and that is always a problem.
https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/691223564486336512/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I’ve got to say, that scene from “Thelma and Louise” where Susan Sarandon shoots the would be rapist is one of my favorites. Of course you think,”Just walk away, he’s a POS” but there is that rush of satisfaction when she puts him out of his misery. Great cinema but not good for real life.
One does what one does to SURVIVE.
Check your email ladies
Done!
https://twitter.com/JeffSmithMO/status/690002394604769281?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The excerpt they posted at BJ:
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/01/24/excellent-read-rebranding-the-koch-brothers/
This is some EVIL SHIT right here.
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/691042508093165568?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/petesouza/status/691290763582423043?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The HEAT IS ON!
And memo to Hillary Clinton:
WE’RE NOT GOING TO FALL FOR THE OLD BANANA IN THE TAIL PIPE.
https://twitter.com/3ChicsPolitico/status/691287515106414592
where is the 3CHICS side eye gif with the Sista drinking….
that is needed for this.
(3) 3 CHICS SIDE EYES
One of These Nights! Glen Frey’s favorite Eagles song; is my favorite too.
Rik, I love that you got right on these tributes early. Waiting until the end of the year, just wouldn’t have had the same touch for me. THNAK YOU!
Good morning, Ametia and everyone. My favorite Eagles song is Take It Easy, but I like so many of their songs.
“Don’t let the sound of your own wheels make you crazy.”
Morning Liza! the Eagles are a TRUE CLASSIC ROCK BAND. And I agree, there ae so many great songs. Their music stays with you., soooo EASY; like REALLY GOODD FRIENDS… Their lyrics tell a story. POETRY.
I love The Eagles.
I cannot say #BlackLivesMatter and then vote for someone who lobbied for a failed policy which led to the destruction of black families. I can’t do THAT!
https://twitter.com/mboughtonPC/status/691269820071972865
I hope that everyone in the path of this storm is Ok. Respect the elements.
Good Morning Everyone
Good morning, everyone