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Before Alice’s Restaurant…

November 24, 2022 / Eric / 0 Comments

Each year a local radio station switches to an all-Christmas music format. Used to be it make the switch over the Thanksgiving weekend; this year it was first weekend of November, when a lot of folks were still sorting their Halloween haul…

Upon hearing the seasonal songs had arrived ever earlier this year, my daughter observed that, “It’s a shame there are no Thanksgiving songs, too…” I corrected her, and said yes, there are. She assumed I meant the 18-minute classic Alice’s Restaurant (with full orchestration and five -part harmony) by Arlo Guthrie – which, she admitted, is a Thanksgiving Song.

“No,” I said, “there are Thanksgiving songs out there besides Alice’s Restaurant.”

“Like what?” she demanded.

“Take an Indian To Lunch,” I replied.

“There’s no such song!”

And so I reminded her of the song she’s heard many, many times growing up, tucked as it is in the classic history lesson brought to us by Stan Freberg one-fifth score years before Arlo drove trash around in a red VW microbus with shovels and rakes an implements of destruction.

Freberg’s take on this nation’s history, from it’s “discovery” by Christopher Columbus up through the Battle of Yorktown, is a masterful twist on reality, offering an arguably woke perspective on the United States hidden behind brilliant satirical sketches. It took him 35 years to create Volume 2, which essentially covers the 19th century, and, sadly, there is no Volume 3 to skewer the Depression through more modern times.

It was Volume 1 – the early years – that I listened to time and time again until I wore out the grooves. Sparkling wit, great puns, clever songs – to this day it ranks in my personal top three comedy albums of all time. Of course, that’s just my opinion – but it’s shared by plenty of folks out there.

And it’s got the best Thanksgiving song – at least in the “short length” category…

Stop, drop, and roll.

November 15, 2022 / Eric / 0 Comments

We’re now a week past the election; this is the day when Oregon certifies its vote – it leaves a week window open to allow ballots to arrive by mail, and as long as they are postmarked by the deadline, they can be counted. Of the many things on the ballot this year, one of the more contentious items was Measure 114.

In short, this measure requires a permit to purchase a firearm and bans magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. For the permits, police agencies will have to add a process to their offices – already some sheriffs have announced they won’t comply with this addition to Oregon’s Constitution, claiming it is “unconstitutional” in part or in whole.

Funny – I thought the Constitution was pretty clear: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”

Well now: regulations. Go figure.

Measure 114 puts Oregon near the head of the pack when it comes to firearms regulations. It doesn’t take firearms away from anyone, although reading the voter’s guide and letters to the editor leading up to election day there were many dire warnings about government coming for your guns! Measure 114 just, well, regulates the sale and transfer of them going forward.

This measure came about in no small part because a number of us have been fed up with the epidemic of firearms deaths in our nation. Yesterday’s headlines tell us about the shootings at the universities of Virginia and Idaho, in a year where there have been 599 mass shootings thus far.

At the rate we’re going, by the time you read this, we’ll be past 600 mass shootings for the year.

In a few weeks, we will meet a grisly anniversary: the tenth anniversary of the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary. Sandy Hook is but one of many school shootings over the years, but it’s worth noting its anniversary for a few reasons. One is personal: Benny Wheeler, killed at six years, is the nephew of a childhood friend of mine. Another reason is that the victims’ families have been in the news recently, as a vile conspiracy theorist who maligned and slandered those families has been found guilty of his malignant slander, and faces over a billion dollars in court-ordered fines.

We’ve become numb to the daily reports of mass shootings. We’ve become numb to school shootings – over 35 this year. That’s almost one per week of the school year.

A school shooting per week.

Really?

It’s in the face of this epidemic that people started doing something. A few years back, Oregon passed a common-sense safe gun storage law. And this year, Measure 114.

It’s not a wave, but it’s a start. Maybe an early indicator of a changing tide? We can only hope.

We, as a nation, have a problem. Too many people die from firearms in the country. Period.

We can reduce that number, but we manage to avoid our responsibilities to each other in favor of a distorted sense of individual freedoms. Our nation was built on the notion of insuring domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare for we, the people.

And so I was intrigued to read over this morning’s Oatmeal News Network a very insightful piece by the Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak. She makes a great point – we’ve been here before. Fifty years ago, we decided too many people dire from a different kind of fire: actual fire.

So we did something about it. And since then, fewer people die from fire.

And nobody has come to take anyone’s Zippos.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/14/uva-shooting-run-hide-fight-alert/

Seasonal switch

October 22, 2022 / Eric / 0 Comments

It’s that time of year, when the air gets brisk, the colors come out as the leaves come down. For me, I know it’s fall when I start making the soup. Split pea with carrots, celery, onion, and some ham.

Steaming hot crock of pea soup, ready for the ladle.

As I upload the photo it occurs to me: life is strange. I have an eight-month drought on the Blurg, then a few thousand words and a pot of soup.

(I’m sure this was exactly the kind of moment of connection Cerf envisioned when he invented TCP/IP.)

Land-Grant Legacy

October 22, 2022 / Eric / 0 Comments

[This post has been updated. Details at end.]

For more than three decades I have worked for Land-Grant universities. For them what don’t know what that means, a land-grant institution originates in the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, which was a method by which states were granted tracts of federally controlled land they could then sell or manage to raise funds that would then be used for for the creation of endowments for state colleges.

Thus, the “land-grant” colleges were born, a string of state schools across the nation designed to meet the pressing needs of education at the time, primarily in the fields of agriculture, science and engineering, in response the growing industrial revolution. Also military science – as we were in the middle of a bloody civil war.

In my old granite state stomping grounds, New Hampshire’s land grant of 150,000 acres raised enough capital to create the NH College of of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Hanover, which grew and eventually moved to Durham thanks to a generous bequest from Ben Thompson, and thence continued to grow into today’s University of New Hampshire.

The A&M focus was common across the nation, and many schools today still use A&M in their names, in places such as Tallahassee FL, Miami OK, and College Station TX. Chances are, a school that calls themselves “Aggies” started with a land grant.

Once such school is Oregon State University. Its College of Agricultural Sciences bills itself as the oldest, founding college at OSU, which was once, in fact, called Oregon Agricultural College.

All of the land-grant colleges started with a donation of land from the federal government to the states. Younger western states like Oregon in the mid-1860 had a lot of federal land within their new borders, land that was given to settlers in in large chunks thanks to laws like the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Law and later under the 1862 Homestead Act. It’s curious to me, raised in seacoast NH, to walk around here in Corvallis and see plots of land that were doled out under those programs when the town, later city, was first settled by folks who came out the Oregon Trail.

So where did NH’s land-grant land exist? Turns out that NH and other northeast land-grants were made with western federal land – the states were given “scrip” that described their grant.

As it turns out, my career in higher education has Oregon roots – on both coasts, as UNH’s land grant included 22 parcels of land in Coos, Josephine, and Douglas counties totaling 1,816 acres. Oregon State University began with 91,629 acres spread across 601 parcels in Oregon.

I chose to live in a problematic state; my time here has opened my eyes to a history that I never learned much about on the other side of the nation. For example, Oregon’s first constitution prohibited black people from the state. (Maybe “problematic” is an understatement…)

Oregon, like much of the west, was created in the nation’s era of Manifest Destiny – we expanded from the collections of colonies on the Atlantic coast to cover the continent all the way to the west coast in a remarkably short period of time. Some of the expansion was made possible through land grabs, some by land sales. Along the way, it’s worth noting, this new nation and all its new settlers were moving into a place that was not empty.

My old home of Dover, NH, is going to celebrate its quadricentennial next year. But for thousands of years before the past four hundred it was home to many tribes of indigenous peoples. Across the nation, as settlers carved a new nation out of the coastline and western wilderness, white people displaced and decimated native nations. Along the way, many, many treaties were made between the new nation and the older ones, which the new, expanding nation broke with impunity, many times, over and over.

Sidebar: I had long known of the rotten history that is the treatment of native peoples here in the U.S. Perhaps the strangest way I learned of the impact of this history was through satire, in the form of an audio sketch by the Firesign Theatre, Temporarily Humboldt County. Without trying to break down satire, as overthinking it makes it fail, what makes this piece work is the fact it is so horribly rooted in truth. A formula has been posited that explains humor: Comedy=Tragedy+Time. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but it seems to work in this sketch.

More seriously, a greater reawakening of this knowledge and concern in me began back in 2011 when I recorded an interview program with Paul VanDevelder, who had received the 2011 Oregon Book Award for Savages and Scoundrels (Yale University Press), telling the history of the violations of treaties made between the United States and the native populations of its lands. Bottom line: the actions against the tribes of this nation by the federal government are, simply, crimes. If treaties are, as our Constitution states, the “supreme Law of the Land,” than our government has a long, sordid history of breaking the law.

In recent years, we white folks have been forced to come to face this horrible truth. A few years ago, our university began the practice of including a land acknowledgement at university events. Here’s a sample of an early version suggested by a resolution from student government:

Let it be acknowledged that Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR is located within the traditional homelands of the Mary’s River or Ampinefu Band of Kalapuya. Following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 (Kalapuya etc. Treaty), Kalapuya people were forcibly removed to reservations in Western Oregon. Today, living descendants of these people are a part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon (https://www.grandronde.org) and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians (https://ctsi.nsn.us).
https://asosu.oregonstate.edu/land-rec

One of the things that struck me when I first came to this campus was the presence of numerous cultural centers, and the one I’ve been most interested in over these years is Kaku-Ixt Mana Ina Haws, known as the Longhouse. I’ve attended a number of events over the years, many as part of my job to record or stream events, but many more just out of my own curiosity. In 2020, we began to see signs around campus declaring “This is Kalapuyan Land,” an outgrowth of an exhibition by the same name. As these signs began appearing on a campus mostly deserted due to pandemic, their impact was not as broadly felt for another year, but folks who were on campus saw them, and heard the land acknowledgments in Zoom meetings and online events with a different awareness.

The land acknowledgements began to evolve. A Faculty Senate President introduced a new bit of verbiage in her statement before meetings, explaining that some parts of the suggested one felt a bit like boilerplate (my description). The College of Agricultural Sciences has been discussing with numerous stakeholders the status of native lands near here on which a an experimental farm is operated by the college.

We also saw other campuses around the west and the rest of the nation begin to grapple with their own relationships with native people and lands, from similar land acknowledgement statements to curated exhibits, campus place names and markings, and more. I was intrigued to see UNH, too, was making gestures towards…what, exactly? When we began saying the words, I wondered: is this a beginning to restorative justice, or will it just be a restorative interpretation?

In making presentations, I have at times been one chosen to read the words. At one point during the COVID interregnum, my producer’s brain got me to thinking about making a short video version with words and images, to make it easier for people across campus to include a uniform acknowledgement in campus presentations…but it didn’t take me long to connect the dots and realize that it wasn’t about making the statement easy to do. Having read the words out loud, I understood, somewhat, why the form has evolved, depending on who is reading it, since we introduced it as a necessarily element in public events.

Still, it felt like…well, just words.

Then something exciting happened last spring: the University of California system announced their Native American Opportunity Plan. In short, California students who are also enrolled in federally recognized Native American, American Indian, and Alaska Native tribes get free tuition.

WOW! That’s a lot more than words, for damn sure. When I heard that news, I was kind of sad – someone else did it before us, but I was eager to see what OSU would do. Finally, in August, we learned what OSU would do: any person enrolled in a federally-recognized tribe would be eligible for in-state tuition. So if you’re, say, an Abenaki from the east, you can go to OSU and not pay out-of-state tuition. And if you’re enrolled in one of the Nine Tribes of Oregon:

students who are enrolled members of the Nine Tribes of Oregon may be eligible to enroll in the state of Oregon’s newly announced Oregon Tribal Student Grant Program, which provides assistance up to the cost of attendance at Oregon public and private non-profit colleges and universities.
https://leadership.oregonstate.edu/speeches-and-statements/osu-allow-state-tuition-enrolled-members-all-federally-recognized-tribal

Emphasis added. Worth noting: this particular grant program is only funded for the 2022-23 academic year, but, if eligible, it means that a tribal member here in Oregon can attend tuition-free.

Some work is begin done in Oregon, and in recent weeks the rivalry school south of OSU stepped up with a similar announcement that the University of Oregon (not a Land-Grant, but located on stolen land, too) will cover full tuition and fee costs for American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) residents. UO is doing this in a manner similar to OSU’s plan:

…incorporating wrap-around services that support student retention and graduation through complementary financial assistance, improved counseling and academic services, and professional development. Once state and federal options have been exhausted, the UO will waive remaining tuition and fees for Oregon residents who are enrolled citizens of the 574 federally recognized tribes.
https://homeflight.uoregon.edu/

These are good steps, but are they enough?

Meanwhile, I hadn’t realized how much our land acknowledgment statement had evolved at OSU, until I heard a college dean reading one in a public meeting. The new one has come quite a long way since the students crafted one one in 2019. It reads:

Oregon State University recognizes the impact that its land grant history had on Indigenous communities in Oregon. Through the Morrill Act of 1862, which established land grant universities in the United States, the federal government seized nearly 11 million acres of land from 250 sovereign tribal nations, with little or no compensation.
In 1868, the state legislature designated Corvallis College as Oregon’s land grant institution. Soon after, Oregon received 90,000 acres of federal lands — taken from the Klamath, Coos, Lower Umpqua, Siuslaw and Coquille people — to be sold to create an endowment supporting the growth of the new college, which would become Oregon State University.
Oregon State University in Corvallis is located within the traditional homelands of the Marys River or Ampinefu Band of Kalapuya. Following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855, Kalapuya people were forcibly removed to reservations in Western Oregon. Today, living descendants of these people are part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. Indigenous people are valued, contributing members of the Oregon State community and represent multiple sovereign tribes among students, faculty, staff and alumni.
Oregon State University accepts its responsibility for understanding the continuing impact of that history on these communities. Oregon State is committed — in the spirit of self-reflection, learning, reconciliation and partnership — to ensure that this institution of higher learning will be of enduring benefit, not only to the state of Oregon, but also to the people on whose ancestral lands it is now located.
https://oregonstate.edu/land-acknowledgement

Words.

Isn’t it past time to go beyond talking about concepts such as restorative justice, and time to start acting it out? Yes, OSU, the problematic State of Oregon’s flagship research university, its Land-Grant institution, is trying to do something, but I would argue it is not enough.

Why does any Land-Grant university charge a fee for indigenous people to attend? Seriously – why can’t the descendants of the native people who were robbed to create these lucrative endowment start getting something back? An opportunity for direct restorative justice is sitting right there: simply don’t charge anyone enrolled in a federally recognized tribe any tuition.

It’s way past time to start making up for the original theft.

[Updated 24 October. In my original post, I did not get the details of OSU’s plan quite right, so I fixed that, and while in there I rewrote the end a bit. Tangentially, I had a nice chat with the interim Chief Diversity Officer at OSU today, and he mentioned a few other interesting things I had not noticed before, such as the impact some research involving indigenous knowledge can have from an intellectual property perspective. I need to wrap my head further around that notion. The bottom line to me is that the legacy of the land-grants is something rather awful, and making land acknowledgments is far too little to get us back into any semblance of karmic balance. That non land-grant schools like UO are grappling with the history of the land upon which they sit is useful to see, too. But we all still have a lot of work to do, and a long way to go…]

Trek To Galehead – August, 2000

October 19, 2022 / Eric / 0 Comments

Northeast Passage is a group of dedicated individuals at the University of New Hampshire “empowering individuals with disabilities to define, pursue, and achieve their Therapeutic Recreation and Adaptive Sports goals.” In late summer 2000, a group with NE Passage trekked to the newly renovated Galehead Hut in NH’s White Mountains.

Here’s a short story we made from that weekend:

If the embedded video is not displaying for you, try watching on Vimeo

The inspiration for the trek was the uproar over upgrades that were done to the rustic cabin located on Forest Service land, which required meeting current ADA spec. Many in the AMC community thought the ADA requirements were balderdash and poppycock (although they used less colorful language) and railed that the next step would be paving the pathway itself.

For Jill and the team at NE Passage: challenge accepted. Three wheelchair users and two crutchers completed the climb, and I was charged with documenting the event. In addition to recording much of the video you see (while hiking the trail myself), I also coordinated a 2nd unit and sound recordist – couldn’t have done this without Tom & Mark – plus a “sherpa” who brought fresh production supplies. Also embedded on the trek was a reporter and photographer for the New York Times, as well as another video crew. Almost a bit of a circus swirling around the actual hikers…

Heading down the mountain after two nights in the hut, the team was met by hikers coming up the trail with a copy of the day’s NYT – we were the first story from the University of NH to make the front page of the Old Gray Lady. (Below the fold – but still!)

This video is one of the stories we made from the footage – it ran during an intermission in NHPTV’s coverage of a UNH Hockey game…and that’s how I got an Emmy on my shelf. We also completed a half-hour feature on the trek commissioned by the UNH Foundation. (I sure wish I’d saved a copy of that one, as there is a ton more footage and fun.)

To my great surprise, I was less tired or sore after getting home than I expected I would be. Something in the work and the people I was with was keeping me going with ease. Working with Northeast Passage on this project and many others informed my thinking about life and how inclusive actions make us all better people with fuller experiences. I am grateful I got to know Jill and the others, and feel lucky to have tagged along.

Meanwhile… I recently discovered a 20-year retrospective video on the trek put together by my friends at Northeast Passage. Watching it, you can see what a difference the trek made to so many people – our teams, yes, but even folks who weren’t part of the challenge.

I can’t embed the video, but you can watch it on YouTube. That’s Jill Gravink, Founder and Director of Northeast Passage at the beginning.

To this day, I have yet to experience anything like this project. It was hard work, sure – even the day before the trek we climbed some supplies to the hut and did some test footage. During the hike up, I bounced between the lead and middle teams, and probably climbed the trail twice. On the way down, again I bounced, from the middle team to the last team, at one point, I ditched the camera to lend an extra set of hands and getting chair down Jacob’s Ladder.

Then I hiked back up to retrieve it, and hustle back to leapfrog those folks and find the group further down.

I have never worked so hard for a story before, let alone a story that meant so much to so many. Thanks, Jill (and everyone!) for having me along.

20,454

February 3, 2022 / Eric / 0 Comments

It’s just a number, that’s all.

490,896 is a bigger number, but it’s just the same; and so, for that matter, is 29,453,760.

Different numbers; different ways of looking at the same thing.

Glad I could help.

Seven hundred thirty-one

January 21, 2022 / Eric / 0 Comments

When you write it out in words instead of digits, it seems more impressive.

731.

See? But here we are, that many days since a positive test came back for
SARS-CoV-2 in Snohomish County in state state of Washington.

Two years – officially – have we now been dealing with this virus, this pandemic, in our nation. We’re hitting a few milestones over the next several weeks. Two years since this, two years since that. Sitting here over my breakfast, a flood of things came to mind when I heard the two-year mark noted on the radio. The earliest days were confusing. We’d been following the progress of this disease as it quickly spread beyond first one city, then the next, then leapt borders and continents.

Then, two years ago today, a Washington public health official said, “it’s here.”

Suddenly, the images of masked people from an infected metropolis were domestic images, not international news. Schools closed. Businesses closed. Reactions were swift, and varied, and in some cases seemed like panic. Amidst the reality of the spread of COVID-19, the biggest headlines seemed to be about the toilet paper wars.

One-fifth of a decade into this plague, we’ve come a long way. Or have we? Masks seem everywhere, and yet, as I dropped Her at the bus this morning, I watched a group of young adults try to board the bus sans masks. Stopped by the driver. They were incredulous that they couldn’t ride on a public transit without a mask.

Incredulity no longer rises within me at these sites: even this far in to a pandemic, it’s become the norm that there are those who, through willful ignorance or willful disregard for the state of affairs seem to still not get it: we’re in a pandemic.

Two years in, and some folks still can’t grasp that.

I fear this is just the first of many multi-annual milestones before we start clocking the days this is (finally) behind us.

Stay safe. Stay well. Mask up, get your shots. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic folks – the middle.

Happy New Year (so far…)

January 2, 2022 / Eric / 0 Comments

It’s too soon to tell, really; the year has only just begun. A look at the headlines does make me wonder at times. I’ve been on record for some time – since about September – saying I can’t wait until 2023 is over… Already over the holiday break we’ve seen wild weather, wild COVID numbers, and increasingly wild reportage out of our nation’s capitol, most of which is now tied to the looming anniversary a few days hence.

Still, it is only January 2 (as I type this) and I’ve just opened a brand new calendar, which still has that new calendar smell. This can bring a person hope, if only for a few days.

I’ll take it.

Get Back to Let It Be

December 5, 2021 / Eric / 0 Comments

Before I started watching, I already knew the ending. But like in so many parts of life, it’s not the destination; it’s the journey. And so it was beginning on Thanksgiving as I settled in over several nights to follow along Peter Jackson’s 8-hour Beatles adventure from January 1969.

It was quite the ride.

I don’t claim to be any special kind of Beatlephile, but I am unabashedly a life-long fan of the fabs, and I’ve been waiting for this with high expectations, as I am also a fan of Jackson’s work. To have access to the entire vault of film and sound recordings made alongside the recording sessions that, ultimately, gave us the last release of the Beatles would be a dream gig. Probably a nightmare, at times, but I can only begin to imagine what it was like working through all those miles of footage…and having seen the final result, I am wondering what kind of gems had to be cut to wrangle this beast into it final form.

Over the years, I have ingested numerous books, articles, radio and television programs and other media about the Beatles. My interest in the group can be blamed almost in whole on my aunt Mary Anne, who exposed me at the youngest age to their music. (She’s also responsible for my Snoopy and Nilsson interests, all of which I can’t thank her enough, really.) Growing up a child of the 60’s, they were damn near omnipresent in my ears, on the radio, even in the classroom, when Mr. B. would visit with his accordion and we’d sit in the circle singing Ob La Di and When I’m Sixty Four and even, at times, Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds.

It was a gas to hear songs on the radio from John, Paul, George, and even Ringo, all now on their own, and demonstrate my musical knowledge to friends who did not know that song was by someone who used to be a Beatle. Over time, we’d compare their independent careers – based mostly on Top-40 radio, so Paul seemed to be the most successful. Naturally, in my group of friends, to be somewhat iconoclastic, I would defend John over Paul, even after he took leave of his music career to focus on fathering and I had to defend his long-worn efforts over the latest and greatest from Paul.

Then, finally, he released his first album in five years, and I was thrilled. I still have the vinyl I bought on December 5, 1980, two and a half weeks after its release.

We know what happened a few days later.

By that time, I had been reading this and that; the rolling stone stories and interviews…the Playboy interview, and a few of the books. I’d managed to see the 1970 version of Let It Be, a film (in my recollection) that was far too dismal to be true. I mean, after the sessions that gave us the album Let It Be, they went back into the studio and gave us Abbey frickin’ Road, a farewell that was a much better gift as their last work, even if the timing of the releases made it seem more penultimate than ultimate.

All of this to say, the story of the Beatles is one with which I feel confident in saying I am quite familiar…and yet…so much over the years was never properly resolved in telling of the end. By most accounts, the sessions in Twickenham, where George famously quit for a few days, were the end of the group. After all, Yoko was there – forever demonized as the catalyst for the split. Of course, very little is made of the fact that Ringo quit the group four months earlier – and stayed away a week longer than George did when he quit – while the sessions that gave us The Beatles were creating more conflict that the Twickenham sessions did.

We weren’t there. We don’t know how they split. Well, we do; there is a timeline, and there is a narrative, but there are so many conflicting stories from the people close the group that have all made it in to this definitive or that definitive version of the story – I’ve lost track. And so many of the stories make the whole John and Yoko story line the reason we don’t have the Beatles today – to which I’ve always called bullshit. (At the risk of digressing too far, it’s worth noting that The Ballad of John and Yoko was recorded four months after the Get Back sessions, and while credited to the group, George was abroad and Ringo was filming The Magic Christian, so John and Paul did it all themselves. There’s a lot of joy on that record.)

At any rate – we weren’t there. And while there is a lot of Beatles history from 1969 we don’t see, Get Back gives us a new look into a part of the year that has been, for more than 50 years, pretty well told.

Or so we thought.

The very first thing we see when watching Get Back (it’s on Disney+ which I’ve kept as a service in anticipation of seeing this) is a notice telling us that what we’re going to experience has been culled from nearly 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recordings. Once I read that, I thought crap – we only get to see 8 hours worth… Fortunately, Jackson and crew have done an incredible job of curating this archive for us and creating a story across three installments. I’ll not give a travelogue, other than to say Part 1 is in Twickenham studio and ends as George leaves; Part 2 is the group getting back together and decamping to the basement of their Apple HQ on Savile Row, to be joined by Bill Preston on keys, and Part 3 culminates with the rooftop concert.

Along the way, we get to be the proverbial fly on the wall watching the lads get together each day and make music. Sometimes they experiment with new songs and new sounds. Other times they kick back and play 50s rockers.

How young they looked in this film. The image quality is exceptional, as is the sound, and all throughout I marveled at how good it looked, as if it had been recorded last week. For a very large part of the time, they are just goofing off, playing together, but even when they good off you can see their amazing talent, and then, as I watched, it occurred me: none of them were yet 30, and yet they’d been rocking together as a band, in earnest, for a dozen years.

Also: how tired they looked. On most days, they all display a workman-like mien, coming in at the start of the shift each day to do their job, ply their trade, and lay down some tracks. And while the rooftop concert only yields a handful of songs, by the end of January, 1969, we’ve seen the Beatles create the album Let It Be and get a jumpstart on Abbey Road, plus a glimpse at the solo projects brewing from George’s All Things Must Pass, Paul’s Ram, and John’s Imagine albums.

Get Back is a look with love at the Beatles, from a time that we all thought we knew. But until I saw it with my own two eyes, I never knew that John, Paul, Ringo, and Yoko rocked out in jam sessions – Paul wide-eyed and hooting as he does when he’s in a groove, Yoko ululating in her avant-garde splendor. Yoko wasn’t the only band partner who spent time in the studio during these sessions – it wasn’t the boy’s-only club we thought she broke up from the old, “traditional” narrative.

I am sure that in whittling down the hours and hours (and hours!) of recordings to the mere (!) eight we’re allowed to see, narrative choices were made. Much of the story we knew (at least, thought we knew) is intact. The soundstage, the cameras, the walkout, the move to Apple’s building, Billy, and the rooftop – it’s all there, but presented in a new and more thoughtful manner. Long takes of song fragments are allowed to evolve into the works we’ve come to know. Long dialogues allow us to hear the give and take between the partners, giving us insight into how these songs came to be; and how the band was winding down.

All of this is to say: watch Get Back. If you are a Beatles fan, you’ll better know your band from doing so. If you are not a Beatles fan, you’ll likely come away better knowing why, even today, they are a phenomenon and back on the charts. But one word of warning: this is not something to be binged. I forced myself to watch in chunks. It’s too much to process, all in one setting. It’s like a fine dessert -oh, sure, you could just dig in and eat the whole thing, but it’s better if you take a small slice, savor it, then come back later for more. The good feeling lasts longer, and you don’t overwhelm your senses.

Had the pandemic not set in when it did, it is likely that this would have been a three-plus hour film for release in theaters. Because of COVID, the release was pushed back, and in the interim, the wise decision was allowed to make it longer, in three parts, and, ultimately, better. Well worth the extra I’ve paid monthly to have the Disney+ service.

I’m only giving this two thumbs up because that’s all the thumbs I’ve got.

Money, Money, Everywhere…

December 3, 2021 / Eric / 0 Comments

An interesting read this morning over the tea and toast from the Chronicle of Higher Education that looks at the astronomical figures that make up the salary line of Div. 1 colleges and universities. Well, not the entire salary picture – my own personal experience has been that most public employees aren’t getting even proportionally outsized salaries. No, those astronomical numbers occur consistently in one department across our nation’s campuses: the athletic department.

Joy Blanchard, an associate professor of higher education at Louisiana State University, calculated the difference between her salary and that of her university’s head football coach at the time, Edward Orgeron … Blanchard wanted to know how long it would take him, at his salary, to earn her salary. The answer? Just 2.6 days.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-are-paying-big-bucks-for-coaches-heres-what-else-they-couldve-spent-the-money-on

Yes, the story does explain the different pools of money that fund athletics versus the rest of the academic enterprise; it discusses the role of donors to lessen the demand of general funds or tuition revenues to make our sports coaches the highest paid public employees in every state. I get all that.

But I’ve been in higher ed for more than three decades and the reality is that the number of athletics programs that are truly fiscally independent, that don’t exert a downward drag on campus finances is a mere handful.

More often than not, athletics budgets magically show up as “balanced” only because the rest of their host campus foots the bill for additional costs, be they infrastructure (building maintenance, parking structures, silly things like internet, phones, and employer costs for employee health care, workers comp, etc.) or just direct subsidies for academic assistance (often in gated facilities available only to athletic elites, not the general student population who may need them, too…). all the way up to direct repayment of debts incurred because, in many – most – cases the athletics enterprise operates in the red and ultimately the institution is the co-signer on the loan and must make good.

I don’t hate athletics, and have been known to root, root, root for the home teams from time to time, but I find it terribly unsettling where the coach salary arms race has taken us – all of use – in recent years. The numbers we spend in one place versus another say a lot more about our priorities than any W/L columns or championship banners can ever replace.

Arms race, Eric?

Sure. Why not? Kinda reminds me of a bumper sticker…