When Genius Collides; Wu Tang/Torn/Stewart/Shandling

In This Memoir, No Reference Is Made To Rush Limbaugh's Corpulence Or Erectile Dysfunction Or Extensive Plastic Surgery.

I have been engaged with Rush Limbaugh for a long time. When I was freshman in high school outside of Sacramento (also known as SUCKramento and, less frequently but more poetically, Excremento), a proudly chain-smoking Limbaugh matriculated from sales department intern to on-air personality at KNBR, replacing the syndicated, high-concept buffoonery of Morton Downey, Jr¹ with locally produced Reagan evangelism punctuated by taped "comedy" interludes. He quickly became a local celebrity. The audacity of his opinions and the skewering of the easy targets in post 60s California, not to mention that the small pond that was Sacramento provided little resistance to a personality as big as Limbaugh's and had resented having had to be associated with all that California-in-the-60s stuff anyway, enabled him to establish his show and brand in those boomtown days of AM talk.

Meanwhile, I went off to college. I did a lot of stuff. When I can back to Sacramento, I got a job in a scene shop, building sets for dinner-theater productions of Neil Simon and Thornton Wilder. The senior carpenter was named Clanky, or, I would find out after I asked and was given a long story about a noisy motorbike he used to drive, during which I would look at a poster of a SnapOn Tools model autographed to him and realize it was his last name and it was spelled Klanke, Klanke, and would insist we listen to Limbaugh for 4 hours each morning. He was not exactly funny then, Limbaugh, but he was mocking hippies, which, you know, in those days was ok by me because I was trying to be punk rock and secede from the union and everything. And he talked a lot about smoking, and defended his, and therefore my, and, I suppose, Klanke's, cigarette consumption, which was important to me then.

Here Fester smokes, somewhat sloppily, a MonteCristo #2,.

I don't think he had moved to New York by this time, but I won't pretend to be sure. He had not yet become the sort of party-line conservative he would quickly morph into. He was sort of a community college PJ O'Rourke then. He had not yet invented his imaginary Excellence In Broadcasting network or embraced the the stentorian delivery, particularly the creepy, disingenuous "...,friends"/"Friends,...." he overuses. He also hadn't incorporated the Christian right dogma or the social conservative issues which these days define the right much more than economics. I seem to remember a particular day when he made an out of tone personal confession about having changed or formed an opinion on choice/abortion.

It wasn't ever that I liked him. It was a workplace compromise. We listened before lunch, because Klanke liked it. After lunch, I got to pick, so we listened to KZAP or whatever. If he was gone, I'd turn something else on. But, you know, he was making fun of Jerry Brown just like the DKs. Limbaugh's Old Boy affectations, though, have always seemed little transparent, and, a little sad, to me, like Madonna's English accent, because of that time when I listened to him every morning and could hear him trying it out.

I moved along from that shop and from Sacramento. Limbaugh became a sort of mogul and prime profiteer of the culture war. I went to New Orleans, which could be stressful in it's way, but in which it was possible to shut out the tragedies of the outside world. The LA Riots went off on the weekend of JazzFest, and a lot of people didn't know for days. Except for occasionally passing him on the radio dial, I didn't hear about him much for years, until I returned to San Francisco and an oral fixation and an interest in Cuba led me to cigars.

I was a little bit ahead of the curve on the so-called Cigar Boom of the 1990s, and when it hit hard, I was working in a cigar store. Most of my regular guys, whatever their position on Limbaugh, weren't really interested in talking about anything but the notes of candied cherry and dark chocolate in the Padron Anniversario or whether I could get them Havanas². It was the dilettantes, the people who had read reference to the popularity of cigars and were on vacation or usually didn't get all the way downtown, who upon seeing the humidor and all the cigars laid out in their cedar coffins, would come inside and start touching and squeezing and putting their noses on them. I would rush into the humidor to protect my merchandise and provide excellent customer service. These were the Clinton years, the boomtown years, when Limbaugh was insinuating himself into the national discussion, fusing himself to the Newts and Bushes. Some of these fondlers in my humidor, the same ones who a few years later would invoke Lewinski as what they imagine to be a humorous and convivial conversational gambit, would ask, much to my delight, which ones Rush smokes, or the cleverer ones, which ones were the "AR-turra Fwentees" like Rush smokes? To which I would get to reply:

"I don't know who that is, but the Arturo Fuentes are right over here?"

It was best when they were incredulous or thought I was just misremembering or something and tried to explain who he was without getting controversial.

I would try and reply "Huh. Never heard of him." as many times as I could, while they would try to clarify further or change the subject. 

Then came the drugs. I got no truck with people doing drugs. In fact, I am generally disposed to like drug users, but I am sort of a drug nazi, in that I don't give it any weight as an excuse for bad behavior. If you act like an asshole when you are drunk, you are still acting like an asshole. Your responsibility is to not be an asshole, high or not, and if drugs make you an asshole you better figure out how not to do them, because, you know, we just said it, you have a responsibility to not be a asshole. I try to be charitable, and nonjudgemental about it, but if you aren't someone I love, and you don't become Robert Downey, Jr, it's hard to have much patience. And if you make your career as a propagandist and theorist of the law and order party, and you make sport of people who use drugs for reasons every bit as valid as your own, when you then have chemical and legal issues of your own and ask for sympathy, you look fucking pathetic. I don't even really object to him ratting out his maid and her husband or boyfriend. This is, to paraphrase JayZ, what a ditto look like when a ditto in a roaster. It is only partially the hypocrisy of himself and his audience in minimizing his behavior and insisting it does not affect his credibility. It is the fucking apologies, the apologies of a cocktail party drunk who makes a ham-fisted pass and follows the gropee around all night demanding she demonstrate to him that she still sees him as the person he was before he tried to grab her snatch.

Limbaugh discusses his fishing buddies after his fishing trip to the Domenican Republic

His act has gone on. I pay less attention. It's easy. I don't have cable, and I don't drive too much, so I only have to hear about him when he does something really stupid. So, the Chinese President comes over to collect some of the vig on what we owe them and meet with Limbaugh's mortal enemy Barack Obama. What is "excellence in broadcasting's" take on the head commie, human rights sledge-hammer, currency manipulator, US creditor Big Daddy? What is the voice of conservatism trenchant criticism of the incarnation of communism and totalitarianism? That the speech needs to be translated faster because "who could possibly understand that?" and then to proceed into a ching-chong-ding-dong worthy of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany's or any fourth-grade recess in the country. Quarter of the world's populace, Jack. 

It isn't so much that the chop-suey Chinese embarrasses me as an American so much as it embarrasses me as a guy who sometimes tries to be funny and has tried to imitate a Chinese waiter or storekeeper or gambler who spoke in a particular way. It is embarrassing in the same way as when one of the guys I worked with in that cigar store would greet our Engish co-worker with "Good morning, bloke."

Limbaugh feebly attempts to demonstrate his purported heterosexuality on an eager  volunteer.

I would usually go into the humidor and start straightening boxes, muttering under my breath "Why can't you just shut the fuck up?"

His response to the inevitable criticism of his moronic schtick? "Sid Caesar was called a genius for impersonating foreign languages..." Unlike his "no one understands this gibberish...", which is just his narcissistic obliviousness breaking through his bombastic asshole facade, this is straight up disingenuous. Sid Caesar was a genius because he was funny. You can tell you are funny because people laugh, not because they applaud. Audiences applaud a joke because the support the ideas in it. They laugh at a joke because it is funny. They laugh at Richard Pryor and Early Cosby. They applaud Andrew Dice Clay (after initially, perhaps, laughing at the audacity of his language and the caricature greaser persona) and late Cosby. As a comic, Limbaugh has a very high laugh-to-clap ratio. I am old enough to remember Sid Caesar. You, chief, are no Sid Fucking Caesar. Sid Caesar is still alive and doesn't need me to defend him. I would imagine you have already received communication from the Great Man or his representation with regard to keeping his name out of your overly tanned and moisturized blowhole.

I am not easily offended. At least I try not to be. I have heard funny racist jokes, funny AIDS jokes, funny abortion jokes. What Steven Colbert calls Limbaugh's "kung pao jibberjabber" just isn't funny. It's like that Seinfeld episode where Tim Watley converts to Judaism and Jerry thinks it's just so he can tell jew jokes. He goes to the rabbi or the former priest or whatever and tell him this, the the clergy asks if this offends Jerry as a jew. "No, it offends me as a comic." Colbert's ultimate satire, the show's meta satire, maybe, is that where Limbaugh uses attempted comedy to dodge the idea that his criticism of events should actually be trenchant, he uses the the attempted commentary on events to dodge the idea that his comedy should actually be funny. He does a hilarious impression of a guy with Parkinson's, and I remember in the Sacramento days, he would "abort" callers, hanging up on them mid-sentence to the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Funny. I see you got a whole suitcase full of props there.

I'll be in the humidor.

_______________________

1 Morton Downey, Jr. you might remember, was at first a proto-Limbaugh who himself chain-smoked and had very disturbing carbuncles on his face. In a stroke of brilliance, he took his act to television, where he sort of became a proto-Jerry Springer or lower rent Geraldo. He added bleachers and handed out free tickets and had guests from various fringe groups, whom he would taunt and ridicule. This simultaneously delighted and infuriated the audience, consisting as it did of supporters of the guests' causes, Los Angeles adolescents and punk rockers, outright shills, and the odd seeker of enlightenment who couldn't get a ride to the Dr Gene Scott taping, which would obligingly explode into insults and fisticuffs as the credits rolled and the host smoked. Limbaugh is something of a country club version of MDJr, dispensing with the guests and distilling Downey's gleeful nihilism and defensive intellectual superiority into a conduit for the Republican agenda and a smugger, more Buckley-ish delivery. Downey, say what one will, did embody and exploit a bleakness and cynicism that was pervasive in the Reagan era and seemed especially palpable in LA in those days. And, late in its run, it sometimes had area punk bands on. As his popularity waned, Downey perpetrated a hoax in which he said he was attacked by neo-Nazis in an airport mens' room, emerging with a swastika magic-markered onto his face. It was drawn backward though, and immediately appeared to everyone who saw it as if it had been made while looking in a mirror. He is mostly remembered today as the father of the cute call-girl Tom Cruise bones on the empty El train in Risky Business.

2 I could. I wouldn't usually, but I could've.

Bar Kays, Y'all.

Unfuckingdeniable.

Unfuckingdeniable.

Bonnie Prince Billy

Merchandise, Gift Shop, Hickory NC

There is a really good Percival Everett story called Appropriation Of Cultures, which has made it so I can't look at the so-called confederate battle flag without smiling.

You can tell they are valuable, because they have the prices placed prominently on them.

I like the softer pink for the ladies, and the butterfly motif suggests a transformation and reemergence from the from old attitudes and ways of being.

 The cutesy alternative to the more matter-of-fact "Redneck Woman" which hung a couple of spots over.

Finally, an unexpected message of unity on black velvet.

Snoop Buys A Nail Gun

The first scene of the last season of The Wire.

The King Is Dead

Elvis died yesterday, 33 years ago. I lived in Mississippi that day, and I remember the silence that descended on that summer afternoon. I had already come to the conclusion that I had been born too late, I don't really know when. I was 12. Star Wars came out that summer, and even in my youthful obsession--I had probably seen Star Wars a half dozen times since the beginning of that pre-VHS summer--I could smell the nostalgia in it. Here was more confirmation.

I saw Elvis at the Houston rodeo. I had seen David Cassidy the year before, and I think I saw Doc Severinson the year after. I would see Evel Kenievel jump a dozen Camaros in the Astrodome, too, but not as part of the Rodeo. I'm not sure why the rodeo had headliners, but it was Texas. We got a day off school  the first Friday the the rodeo was in town. He, Elvis, was a tiny, glittery figure on the center of the Astrodome floor. Even from the top deck, I want to say the Purple Seats, but maybe the Orange Seats. Anyway, the way the lighting worked, you could see the rhinestones flash even at close to a quarter mile away. My grandparents had seen him in Vegas, and when they visited us, my grandfather borrowed my guitar and showed me some of the King's moves. He later made me a strap out of one of his belts, it was white, so I could gyrate while holding the guitar. They were fans of Englebert Humperdink and Shirley Bassey, but the next time we were all in Vegas together they took my parents to see him.

That afternoon, when the Gilligan's Island rerun and dialing-for-dollars movie cut out--late summer, late afternoon, Brandon, Mississippi, you are goddam right I was inside in front of the television--in favor of the haircuts and blazers and somber, unaccented mellifluousness of Jackson newscasters, I wondered if this was what people meant when they talked about remembering where they were when Kennedy was killed. A few years earlier, in Houston, I had watched Lyndon Baines Johnson's all day funeral with my great grandmother, a Republican, like a Lincoln Republican, and patriot, who I can't imagine was super-fond of LBJ (Who knows, maybe she was. In spite of a somewhat dated racial vocabulary, she was vehemently pro civil-rights and pro-Vietnam entanglement, so maybe she loved LBJ. I do remember vividly she and my mother screaming at each other about Richard Nixon, though, her, the great-grandmother taking the rare-for-the-time pro-Nixon position.), but we sat there from noon to sundown in my parents' living room watching the caisson creep down Congress in the rain. I was pretty sure that wasn't what the Kennedy people were talking about.

Jailhouse Rock is easily the best Elvis movie. Viva Las Vegas! has some cool songs and old Vegas scenery and Anne Margaret. My favorite, though, is Roustabout, because his co-star and erstwhile love interest is Barbara Stanwyck. It haslo has the song "Poison Ivy League" which in certain fantasies, I get to play from the DJ booth when GW Bush comes into the fantasy West Louisiana dive bar where I work for minimum wage (It's a pretty high-concept fantasy.)

That Albert Goldman Elvis: What Happened? was a nasty piece of work, but highly readable and satisfying in a corpse desecrating kind of a way. Griel Marcus famously calls Goldman a hippy in the pre-60s/Yippee sense--the guy who has to use the most highly charged and provocative vocabulary and phrasing to describe anything at anytime--in opposition to a hipster who knew when and what to say and knew how to keep things cool. His Mystery Train makes a great antidote to Goldman's venom. Then Peter Guralnick takes two brilliantly designed volumes to go deeper and than anyone else ever will.