Firehose #186: Sail on, Sailor

Also: Hail and farewell, King Sol

For a couple years there around the turn of the millennium, the hottest rock band in Hollywood happened to be four dear friends of mine, in an outfit called Tsar. (They had become the hottest band in Hollywood like two months after they replaced me with a much better bass player, so #AlwaysBeFiringMatt.) Anyway, we were all still young enough to go to every show – there were a lot! – and as such, you get to know your fellow diehards. This I did with basically everyone in the crowd, except for one intense, weird-haired fella always at the front right corner of the stage, intensely bobbing and grooving and smiling and playing the occasional air-drum flourish. I didn’t think much of it, until meeting in my journalism life a guy from Reason magazine, and saying “Hold on, are YOU the guy playing air drums at Tsar shows?” He grinned and nodded.

That was my introduction to Brian Doherty.

Brian, my longtime colleague, sometime employee, and for the past several years my dedicated editing assignment, died Thursday night/Friday morning after stumbling and falling down a precarious slope in an old abandoned World War 2 battery near Sausalito. He was, very appropriately, in the midst of some art happening/hijinx, despite needing a cane to walk after a couple rough years of physical ailments. My Reason obituary is here.

I wanted to briefly expand on one Dohertian aspect of particular potential Fifdom resonance. We over-index for music talk/appreciation around these parts, and o lordy jeebus so did Brian. Besides, as his brand new Wikipedia page states, “play[ing] bass in several punk rock bands, including The Jeffersons and Turbo Satan,” Brian was a fierce practitioner of separating art from artist, to the point of defending Rage Against the Machine, Mike Love, and – yes! – Kanye West. Even while spending much of his discretionary time with punk-rock circus types, he maintained a pure and ecumenical affection for perfectly crafted pop, and for decades held fast to a rule that if he was within driving distance of a concert by rock royalty – McCartney, Dylan, Neil Young, whatever stray Beach Boy was staggering around – then by gum it was his duty to attend. Unsurprisingly, he was an excellent obituarist: of Jimmy Buffet, Prince, Mark E. Smith, his beloved Brian Wilson, and his fellow Gainesvillian, Tom Petty. As his great friend Chicken John Rinaldi told me, “He wasn’t like a good guy, or a great guy, he was a captain.” Sail on, sailor.

* The Brian news came during the annual Reason Weekend conference, at which I was gratified to see a very many Fifth Column listeners and paid subscribers (including the above adorable San Diego/Louisville couple, who added an appropriate “Ding ding ding!”, with perhaps an additional expletive). There were so very many positive comments about our interview with Chris Christie in Episode #548. Maybe that’s the one you should share with your friends and family, get ‘em hooked! As always, our YouTube page, which at least 40,000 of you still don’t subscribe to, has a bunch of eminently shareable shorts (4 on the Christie ep worth a combined 1.5 million views), as well as longer clips and full regular episodes.

Some post-show write-ups can be found on Mediaite, The Independent (UK), OK Magazine, and Ommcon News.

* Another grave loss in the Reason family occurred earlier this past week when Liz Wolfe’s beloved baby Solomon died after two and a half months struggling to overcome a myriad of medical issues. The family celebrated mass yesterday, and I know there was a contingent of Fifth stalwarts there, which I appreciate very much.

* More clips for those of you in the cheap seats: From Members Only #308 with ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, here talking about some worrying economic signs that might be pointing toward the next bubble to be burst.

* And from M.O. #307 with physicist Sean Carroll, about the multiverse and misinformation:

* Old pal Eli Lake (veteran of #52, #65, #141, #174, Special Dispatch #51, #326, #368, #407, M.O. #184 & M.O. #244) was around the neighborhood this week, talking Iran on The Moynihan Report….

… and then going toe-to-toe with an increasingly anguished Andrew Sullivan.

* The war was also the main topic on this week’s Reason Roundtable, which feels like a thousand years ago:

* More recent commentary on the subject from Kmele & the gang over at Tangle News:

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Somewhere between the fabled media monoculture of the 20th century and the seizure-inducing A.I. slop-fest we’re currently mired in, there was the Iraq War. It was 2003, we were all so young, and so was Al Jazeera—a scrappy Arabic-language satellite news network funded by the government of Qatar in order to (in my opinion) increase the country’s influence in the region. Control Room, directed by Jehane Noujaim, is a fascinating verité documentary that captures the early days of the Iraq War from the POV of Al Jazeera journalists trying to pry information from U.S. military public affairs officers. The film bounces back and forth between Al Jazeera’s HQ in Doha and CENTCOM’s media center just 20 miles down the road, where we meet U.S. Marine Lt. Josh Rushing. Rushing emerged as the “star” of this film after appearing to go through a journey of personal growth from on-message patriot to self-reflective empath who could understand why some in the region might see the U.S. as occupiers—endearing him to American anti-war activists and putting him in hot water with his superiors. Rushing, who would go on to work for Al Jazeera English, once told me that his perceived journey was little more than skillful editing on the part of the filmmaker, which makes Control Room super meta—a film about media, messaging, and propaganda that arguably constructs a narrative of its own. Regardless, it is a compelling watch and an incredible document of how much the media, the U.S. government, and even war itself have changed. Watch it on Tubi; buy it on DVD; here’s the original U.S. trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Ben:

On Clinton: I’ve seen Bill stop to meet a class of preschoolers on a playground he was jogging by, and then recall the names of staff and children a few months later.

He’ll have conversations with people on line at the deli for 45 minutes about their golf swing. I would’ve taken stuff like this to be an exaggeration but I happen to live near them and have seen it myself.

PS, he upholds his legend in other ways too: my friend has a great photo of Bill looking at his wife’s cleavage in a photo of the 3 of them!

Sendoff: Tryna channel the spirit of Brian Doherty with the musician death calendar of the previous week, I’m choosing the obvious route—a guy who was ubiquitous at California outdoor/hippie/protest festivals, who was name-checked in a Beach Boys song, and whose most famous tune was an anti-war anthem. Have fun with Brian out there, Country Joe!