A Rubber Door

This past St. Patrick’s day, former St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire, sat in front of congress to discuss steroid use in major league baseball. When asked about his personal experience McGwire chose to essentially plead the 5th. The fact is McGwire didn’t tell us the truth, but he also didn’t lie to us. But the media and baseball fans everywhere threw McGwire under the bus. They said he wasn’t “forthcoming”. Reporters said they wouldn’t vote him into the Hall of Fame. McGwire was disgraced.

At this same congressional hearing Baltimore Oriole first baseman Rafael Palmeiro defiantly told congress that he had never taken performance enhancing drugs “period”. The same media and baseball fans pointed to Palmeiro’s testimony as a shining example of what McGwire should have said. This past week Palmeiro was suspended when steriods were found in his system. I’m pretty sure that Palmeiro didn’t come up with the idea to take steroids all of a sudden in the past month at the age of 40. It is likely that he lied to us in March. Big surprise.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Our culture is one that prefers and expects a good lie when cornered. My girlfriend always says it’s basically the idea of “respect me enough to lie to me”. This is wrong. If someone decides that to avoid lying, it’s best to not speak at all, we should respect that decision.

I have no proof that Sammy Sosa, Curt Schilling, and Rafael Palmeiro didn’t lie on that day in March, but I know for a fact that Mark McGwire didn’t. While McGwire didn’t deserve praise for what he did, at least he deserved our respect.

Update: Sam has passed away. There was a contest to find a new world’s ugliest dog.
The worlds ugliest dog. I thought it was fake until I started reading the site. The dog would scare little children.

If you haven’t seen the Robert Novak video you have to see it. Carvelle must have laughed all night about it.

Click on comments to read my thoughts. SPOILERS ALERT!

It’s been a five year wait, but it has been worth it. Michael Penn’s new cd Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947 has been released and is now sitting at a store near you. May I recommend that you scoot over to Borders where the purchase comes with a bonus disc of Michael’s soundtrack work.

The bonus disc is entitled Cinemascope — A Sampler of Incidental Music Recorded for the Screen in Stereo.

1. Down By The Riverside
2. Infidelity
3. Girls Go
4. Harry Called
5. Pool Ballet
6. Theme
7. Alex
8. Nice Turkey
9. Arcade
10. Phyrogiants

Tracks 1,6, and 9 from the film “The Comedians of Comedy”
Tracks 2,3,7,8, and 10 from th film “Melvin Goes to Dinner”
Tracks 4 and 5 from the film “The Anniversary Party”

Here’s a link to the review of Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947 (subscription required)

Michael Penn’s light, heavy rock

By Scott Galupo
August 2, 2005

Michael Penn
Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947
Mimeograph/spinART Records

The first scene in “Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947,” Michael Penn’s sketch of a concept album, is of a G.I. returning home from World War II, weary, defeated and dislocated: “I’m the walking wounded/I’d say it to your face/but I can’t find my place,” Mr. Penn sings in “Walter Reed,” named for the famous Army hospital (soon to go on the chopping block in the next round of military base closures).

The soldier’s lament might as well be Mr. Penn’s, though to a far less life-threatening extent. The singer-songwriter is both a one-hit wonder (”No Myth,” from 1989’s “March”) and, for a small but devoted following, a continual favorite and an industry veteran. Yet this brother of a famous actor (Sean) and husband of a more successful singer-songwriter (Aimee Mann) has had trouble staying on his feet in the music business, trading blows with a major label that, he said, refused to free him from a contract while also prohibiting him from putting out new music.

Taking a page out of Miss Mann’s do-it-yourself playbook, Mr. Penn formed his own imprint, Mimeograph Records, for the release of “Mr. Hollywood,” his first LP in five years. It’s a typically crafty and modestly successful work from Mr. Penn, who continues in the vein of Beatles pop-rock and Dylan-style intellectualism.

Don’t let the “concept album” bugaboo scare you: Most of the songs here are personal meditations or story-song narratives; politics and history are kept abstractly on the margins. For instance, it takes some effort to trace the steps of the song “18 September,” a minute-and-a-half of aquatic noise and engine hum. A scan of Mr. Penn’s breezy liner notes and a Google search reveals Sept. 18 as the date of the passage of the National Security Act and the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. That task having been completed, it takes a left-leaning disposition to take this for something ominous.

Mr. Penn sees 1947 as a very important year for all sorts of cultural-historical reasons, some of them sinister. There’s the partitioning of Palestine, the double-super-secret mind-control experiments of Project Paperclip and the Hollywood blacklist, which ensnared Mr. Penn’s father, the actor-director Leo Penn.

On a lighter note, Mr. Penn pays tribute to the invention of the transistor radio in another brief instrumental, “The Transistor,” a bright, tense piece of string music that Mr. Penn may have pocketed from one of his movie scores. The final concept-y interlude, “The Television Set Waltz,” heralds the arrival of TV broadcasting on the West Coast.

Basically, the Smithsonian stuff has nothing to do with the meat of the album — yearning, literate folk-pop tunes such as “Pretending,” “A Bad Sign,” “O.K.” and “(P.S.) Millionaire” and thumping, mid-tempo rock fare such as “Room 712, the Apache” and “On Automatic,” on which the customarily distressed Mr. Penn allows that “things are looking up in the meantime.”
The latter song is a sweet reward to the listener, who, if he’s a fan of Mr. Penn’s, has had to wait half a decade for 10 proper pop songs littered loosely inside a schema that tries to blend popular history with conspiratorial gravity.

“Mr. Hollywood” is either the most subtly intelligent work of 2005 or the sign of a singer-songwriter with too much time on his hands.

I just picked up two cd’s from eMusic (click the banner to the left there, sign up, get 50 downloads for free) that are really good - Bob Mould’s Body of Song and John Doe’s Forever Hasn’t Happened Yet. I think these might be two of the best cd’s I’ve heard this year.

I haven’t read anyone’s blog. I won’t pick up last week’s Entertainment Weekly with Harry Potter on the front. I’m so afraid of the ending being given away but I haven’t had extra time to read it.

I usually only read on my train ride into and back from the office, but I have to finish this book this weekend.