Alaska Employment Law

A couple of movies, a bio, and some music this time.

I know The Bourne Ultimatum has been getting good reviews, but… but… there’s nothing to it.  Non-stop action that verges on the impossible all too quickly (my disbelief really did not have much time to be wilfully suspended).  Tension without plot.  There’s no balance!  My idea of a great action film is that it has balance - like The French Connection.  Sorry, this one gets thumbs down from me.  Maybe I’m too old.  Or, maybe I’m not stupid enough.  (I’m not soliciting opinions.) 

But I loved the excellent In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary focusing on about 10 of the men who went to the moon during the Apollo program, with all footage coming from undoctored NASA films.  Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin are quite entertaining.  And what NASA footage!  Produced by Ron Howard, In the Shadow of the Moon will help you to remember that the nation, and the world, can unite for, and feel really good about, a big idea.  After the Apollo 11 astronauts came back to earth and toured the world, they were struck by people in countries all over the globe who said to them, “We did it.”  Not, “You did it.”  We did it.  Go see this film.

And a book, Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer.  I loved The Clash, I liked the Mescaleros a lot, and I was prepared, even predisposed, to like Joe Strummer.  And if this book had had an editor and about 300 fewer pages (it has 613), I think I might have liked, if not all of Joe Strummer, at least the good parts of the man.  But Chris Salewicz, a journalist and good friend of Strummer’s, could not bring himself to leave out any interview, or any thought, and as a result this book becomes very tedious indeed.  By page 390 Joe has ruined The Clash by firing its drummer, Topper Headon, for heroin abuse and firing his co-writer, Mick Jones, because … well, I am really not sure why.  (Jones went on to reasonable success with Big Audio Dynamite, one of the first bands to use samples and to try to fuse rock music with dance music.  B.A.D. recordings sound dated today, but charming.)  Joe comes to regret these decisions during the “wilderness years” of his career; and we come to regret that there are still over 200 pages left in the book to describe that wilderness.  Mr. Strummer must have been wonderful at some level, because he is pretty clearly an alcoholic with heavy drug use patterns and major neuroses, neuroses that we are repeatedly reminded arise from being sent off to private school by his diplomat parents (Strummer was born in Ankara, Turkey and lived all over the world as a child) and the suicide of his brother.  Strummer died unexpectedly in 2002 of an undiscovered heart defect.  Hey, Hank Williams was an absolutely awful person, but one of the greatest performers of the 20th century.  Like Strummer, he was charismatic.  I don’t think I would want to spend more than half an hour with either one of them, though. 

A postscript: If you don’t know the music composed and played by these two artists, you might now be disinclined to do so.  That would be a mistake.  The Clash were one of the greatest bands of their time (1977-1982), and Joe Strummer (who was the principal lyric writer), with his unique shout-singing style, was a frantic performing genius, not to mention the man most responsible for bringing reggae music to punk music, thereby advancing in the Western world the cause of so-called “world music.”  Justly famous for their album London Calling, the Clash are better approached through the 1979 US edition of their first album (called The Clash) - the one with “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.,” “White Riot,” the excellent Junior Murvin composition “Police and Thieves,” and Sonny Curtis’s “I Fought the Law,” among many others.  Brilliant.

If Mr. Strummer was an important figure, Hank Williams is a deity on the musical Olympus.  The father of contemporary country music, dead in 1953 at age 29 (29!), Williams was a train wreck of a person who nevertheless wrote timeless songs.  It is not easy to imagine a musical universe without “I Saw the Light,” “Honky Tonkin’”, “Move It On Over,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Mind Your Own Business,” “Cold Cold Heart,” “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” “Hey Good Lookin’,” “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” “Half As Much,” “Your Cheating Heart,” “There’s A Tear in My Beer,” and “Lovesick Blues.”  For starters.  If you don’t know any of those songs, you should.  I first heard Hank Williams on my little Motorola transistor radio when I picked up radio station WWVA one night around 1959 or so.  There are a million Hank Williams compilations - I recommend The Ultimate Collection (2CDs) on Mercury, released in 2002.  There is also a 10CD “complete” box set that is not, alas, complete.