Firehose #189: The Era of Awesome Feelings

Also: Area president having a normal one

One would need a heart made of steel-reinforced concrete to be unmoved at the sight of this weekend’s physically daring and mathematically near-impossible retrievals turning a potentially heartbreaking L into a huge W. I’m also talking about the rescue of that downed Air Force weapons officer inside Iran….

Because yin also requires yang, the president of the United States of America was not going to let this unalloyed piece of fantastic & inspiring news pass without pooping on a paper plate:

Typical weekend peace negotiations/war-crimes threats from #47, here on week six of a war at the outset of which he “always thought it was a four-to-five-week deal.” As mentioned on this past week’s Reason Roundtable, I am of the old-fashioned belief that American presidents shouldn’t threaten to do war crimes, which is a hilarious reason to get called a homosexual on Twitter:

* More recently (like, today recently), Nadav Eyal (veteran of episodes #382 & #510) went on Dan Senor’s Call Me Back podcast to take seriously Trump’s latest ultimatum (currently scheduled for 8:00 p.m. Tuesday ET), and “to break down what comes next: a widening war, a strategic endgame, or something in between.”

* Another attempt to decode the president’s Iran strategy came Friday from Kmele & the gang over at Tangle News:

* Meanwhile, in the wake of a sold-out SoFi show, Kmele is petitioning President Trump to “immediately issue an executive order pardoning Kanye West for any past or future crimes” in exchange for Ye performing “this exact set every Friday for the rest of my life.” Hope is not just a town in Arkansas, etc.

* What a glorious, feel-great time we all had at the 10-year anniversary party Wednesday night! Big ups to ride-or-dies Thor Halvorssen, Peter Meijer, Olivia Reingold, Nick Gillespie, and Nancy Rommelmann. So nice we can embed it twice:

Let’s give each of them some love: Thor for his March 28 tweet contending that “Venezuela’s political prisoners are no longer only the regime’s prisoners. The U.S. State Department is not a bystander… it is duty bound to demand their full and immediate liberation”; Meijer for polling in 4^th place in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate. (Don’t run! Don’t run!). Reingold for her livestream-discussed hit Free Press piece, “I am an October 8 Jew”; Nancy for her also livestream-discussed, Noem-husband-occasioned old piece on a small-town southern mayor who offed himself after his kinks were publicized; and Gillespie for bagging Adam Carolla:

* Tuesday’s very interesting first-but-not-last-time Fifth Column discussion with professor of Cuba stuff Ted Henken is an excuse to post two old Cuba-related pieces of mine. First was a descriptive email from the island I sent in February 1998 to pal Ken Layne, who immediately published it on the late, great Tabloid.net, thus alerting me to the goons at the Treasury Dept.’s odious Office for Foreign Assets Control. Excerpt:

This whole deal is a terrible, terrible shame, a waste of effort and once-good works from who knows when. Nobody works, everyone sits around all day, and the buildings slowly rot. I haven’t described Centro Habana, and it’s best not to. People live in unspeakable conditions and fetid decay, no clean water (if any water) anywhere, tiny rooms, narrow slivers of stenchy hallways with rats and cockroaches where there are 10 conversations at once and nothing approaching basic sanitation. Ninety percent of the buildings in Centro Habana, I am sure, would be condemned in any second- or first-world country. I can’t imagine what horror ensues when the place heats up in the summer. Good Christ.

The shops are punishingly depressing, 25 cans of the same brand of condensed milk, and maybe a used toothbrush. […]

It’s not as if I had any doubt before I came, but Dear God will I not ever be able to fathom how one single sniveling San Francisco type can complain about America’s imminent “police state” in one breath, then extol the virtues of the Cuban heroes in the next. Those people need a good clipping of the genitals.

Second was a Reason piece after my March 2016 visit there, talking about the triumph of rock (and rap, and metal) over the hardworking Castroite censors. Selection here chosen purely for Billy Joel discourse:

The Fania All-Stars in 1979 contributed to one of the more bizarre and mostly forgotten musical episodes in modern rock history: the three-day “Havana Jam“ at Karl Marx Theater, where officially sanctioned Cuban musicians, top American jazzmen (such as Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, and Jaco Pastorius), and a who’s who of late-’70s American burnouts (Stephen Stills, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joel) performed for an audience largely composed of apparatchiks and their families.

Chet Flippo’s contemporaneous account of Havana Jam for Rolling Stone is an amusing snapshot of a centrally planned–and therefore largely botched–cultural exchange, filled with such wince-inducing anecdotes as Kristofferson dedicating “Living Legend“ to “your commander in chief, Fidel”; Americans bitterly complaining that they didn’t get to jam with the natives; and the pilot on the outbound flight urging the musicians to “spit on Havana.” The audience walked out en masse at the Fania All-Stars (possibly because western salsa music was still banned, and Fania was known to consort in the U.S. with Cuban exiles such as Cruz), and non-Party Cubans rolled their eyes at their own side’s contributions. “All Cuban music is old people’s music,” one local told Flippo. “[I]t is the music of the 1950s. It is as if there is no now. Musically in this country, it is always yesterday.” […]

[E]ven with the event’s emphasis on old-people music, rock & roll finally did break through, thanks to the perhaps unlikely figure of Billy Joel. More Flippo:

[Joel] closed out the festival with a bang. When he jumped on his piano, the kids in the crowd surged past the guards and really tried to get down. If the Cuban government thought they were keeping rock & roll out of their country, Joel proved them wrong, prompting the American press to dutifully record that he had proved rock & roll can still be subversive.

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Do you believe you decided to come to this theater today? That it was your own idea of your own free will? Whether we know or not we’re all manipulated. It’s becoming almost impossible to think or even act for ourselves anymore. We’re manipulated. Programmed. Brainwashed. Right from the start, right from the day we’re born. By family, by the press, by radio, by television. And more and more we know less and less of who “they” are.

That’s the provocation presented in the very first moments of The Domino Principle, juxtaposed with archival footage of assassinations and IBM mainframes and the image of a 22-year-old Adam Curtis sitting in the back of the theater, furiously scribbling notes. One of the last films by director Stanley Kramer (Judgement at Nuremberg, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner), this paranoid procedural is by no means good, but it has a momentum worthy of its title, and once you’ve been introduced to Gene Hackman as a murderous convict named Tucker with Mickey Rooney as his nipple-hair-twisting cellmate, you just can’t look away. Tucker begins to receive visits from a well-dressed man representing a mysterious “them,” who offers him a way out of prison—in exchange for what, they won’t exactly say. Inevitably (and inevitability is the theme here), Tucker takes them up on their offer, driven by the prospect of reuniting with his wife, played by Candice Bergen. But once outside the prison walls, Tucker discovers he’s no free man. The film never attempts to unpack who’s pulling the levers of this grand conspiracy, and Tucker doesn’t seem terribly fussed about it either. Instead, we remain down in the dirt with those involved in operationalizing the master plan: the handlers (including Eli Wallach and Richard Widmark), and the blunt tools who “they” have manipulated to carry out “their” bidding.

You can buy the Blu-Ray (with The Cassandra Crossing!) at this link, or watch for free on YouTube. Trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Sandy:

Castro’s first press coordinator was an American Journalist named Jack Skelly. Years later (at the risk of dating myself) in the early ’70s I was high school classmates with his twin daughters, and my dad was his sometimes tennis doubles partner. That should qualify me as an expert on Cuba, right?

When Skelly died in 2016, I took it upon myself to get some ink for “Grandpa Jack” so I wrote a Wikipedia entry, a very short read covering how he more or less bumped into that gig. I linked that below. Also, for news junkies and historians, which I assume all TFC listeners are, the second link is to Face the Nation, January 11, 1959, from Havana. Starting with one of those cool, countdown leaders, followed by ancient, scratchy news film of the hectic studio, men with guns, reporters and techies, guys smoking cigarettes…this was so raw they weren’t even using headphones for interpretation. Skelly leans over periodically and whispers to a very young Fidel who was insisting that they were now a democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_T._Skelly

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/fidel-castro-on-face-the-nation-in-1959/

Sendoff: Ambrosia (with Firefall as a close runner-up) is my go-to answer when the oldies station coughs a pleasantly bland mid-‘70s hit curio whose provenance I can’t quite stick. As such, I could tell you precisely nothing about the band, at least until the death Monday of its founding keyboard player. But! Here are some fun facts about the prog-turned-soft-turned-Yacht-rockers: 1) They’re from Pedro; 2) “their original name was ‘Ambergris Mite,’ but after doing some touring they discovered there was already a band using the name ‘Ambergris,’ so they turned to the dictionary and picked the name ‘Ambrosia’ because a name meaning “nectar of the gods” seemed fitting.” And 3) Founding member Joe Puerto invited the keyboard player to join on the spot after seeing him play in some dingy club: “There was a coffin with speakers in it. And at the end of the room, Chris was there, playing the organ with a bottle of wine on the top, smoking a cigarette, and there was a girl massaging his shoulders as he played, so I go, ‘We gotta get this guy in the band.’” Sho’ nuff! You don’t get to play keys in a prog rock band unless you got chops, so pour a 40 out for the late, great Christopher North: