Friday Night Videos

I recently was part of a conversation online about how The Hobbit films were a great disappointment in comparison to The Lord of the Rings. This is a contention I strongly agree with--I feel that in the 9-plus hours of Hobbit runtime there's probably a pretty good 3-hour film in there somewhere. That said, I found the music and song in the first film to be superior to the film itself. Case in point: Geoff Castelucci's cover of "Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold." I mean, this is a song I really liked way back when I first heard it in the Rankin-Bass animated Hobbit and Peter Jackson's film did it even better (for all Jackson's films' faults, when they get something right, they get it very, very right). Castelucci's cover is just spectacular. Singing bass is one thing, but singing all the parts? That's just nuts.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Pseudo Echo.

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Reading Playboy for the articles: November 1976

My wife, Lisa, has acquired a large collection of vintage Playboy magazines. I'm flipping through those issues that catch my attention and offering my thoughts on the non-photographic content that filled its pages. You know, the articles.

Highlights: Just so we're clear, in no reality was I ever going to follow up last week's disappointing Billy Carter issue with anything other than the Playboy that appeared exactly one year prior. That's right, this week I take a deep dive into the November 1976 issue, which featured what quite possibly is the most famous of all Playboy interviews, with the future president, Jimmy Carter. Fun fact: Playboy, like most magazines, mails out subscriber copies several weeks before the issue is available on newsstands. On rare occasions, when said issue made headlines in other media, Playboy would capitalize on this by slapping a sticker on the newsstand edition highlighting the content that was generating buzz as a way to juice sales. This issue features a big white sticker with blue and red type drawing attention to the Carter interview. Subscriber copies are more sedate.

As for the interview itself, well, it's a mixed bag. Carter discusses his Baptist faith at length. Again and again. But thisisn't necessarily his fault. The prevailing attitude at the time seems to be a deep fear that Carter woud implement some sort of fundamentaist Baptist-flavored Taliban on the U.S. were he elected, which Carter, exhibiting remarkable patience, calmly denies and offers his time as governor of Georgia as evidence that he is not prone to go mad with power and impose his own religious beliefs on others. In a companion article, a complaint is made that all Carter seems to talk about is his religion, to which it is correctly pointed out that religion is the only thing most national media actually asks Carter about. So there's that. The "interview" is also annoying to me in that it is a compilation of multiple interviews conducted over a period of months. Although I understand this can be standard practice, I don't feel it's entirely honest and context and mood can affect an interviewee's answers and by stretching things out so long gives the interview a skewed ability to cherry-pick answers to suit a particular agenda. So here, at the tail end of an extended months-long interview, Carter takes a throw-away question and goes off on a soul-baring monologue that is absolutely stunning in its raw honesty. This would never, ever happen today, and there are mixed opinions on whether it helped or hurt Carter in the election, but damned if it isn't a landmark conversation:

Playboy: Do you feel you've reassured people with this interview, people who are uneasy about your religious beliefs, who wonder if you're going to make a rigid, unbending President?

Carter: I don't know if you've been to Sunday school here yet; some of the press has attended. I teach there about every three or four weeks. It's getting to be a real problem because we con't have room to put everybody now when I teach. I don't know if we're going to have to issue passes or what. It almost destroys the worship aspect of it. But we had a good class last Sunday. It's a good way to learn what I believe and what the Baptists believe.

One thing Baptists believe is in complete autonomy. I don't accept any domination of my life by the Baptist Church, none. Every Baptist church is individual and autonomous. We don't accept donations of our church from the Southern Baptist Convention. The reason the Baptist Church was formed in this country was because of our belief in absolute and total separation of church and state. These basic tenets make us almost unique. We don't believe in any heirarchy in church. We don't have bishops. Any officers chosen by the church are defined as servants, not bosses. They're supposed to do the dirty work, make sure the church is clean and painted and that sort of thing. So it's a very good, democratic structure.

...

The thing that's drummed into us all the time is not to be proud, not to be better than anyone else, not to look down on people but to make ourselves acceptable in God's eyes through our own actions and recognize the simple truth that we're saved by grace. It's just a free gift through faith in Christ. This gives us a mechanism by which we can relate permanently to God. I'm not speaking for other people, but it gives me a sense of peace and equanimity and assurance.

I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, "I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultry."

I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do--and I have done it--and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.

Christ says, Don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife. The guy who's loyal to his wife ought not to be condescending or proud because of the relative degree of sinfulness. One thing that Paul Tillich said was that religion is a search for the truth about man's existence and his relationship with God and his fellow man; and that once you stop searching and think you've got it made--at that pointyou lose your religion. Constant reassessment, searching in one's heart--it gives me a feeling of confidence.

I don't inject these beliefs in my answers to your secular questions.

It is a shame that for this thoughtful, philosophical answer Carter only received mockery for "Lust in his heart."

Forty years removed, the contrast between Carter's statements and religious right couldn't be starker. I'm not going out on a limb by saying the Carter presidency was troubled. He didn't get along well with the Democratic congress and foreign relations bedeviled him, although he achieved a major victory by brokering peace between Egypt and Israel. In many ways he was too honest to be president, and his eschewing of typical political compromise and horsetrading seriously undercut his chances at a second term. That said, there's a convincing argument to be made that Jimmy Carter has been the greatest ex-president the U.S.A. has ever had. The mad has lived a life of service and even now, more than a year into hospice, he continues to inspire as a Good Person.

Other thoughts: Oh geeze, here's Larry L. King again. Look, I've read lots of Larry L. King--more than most living humans, I'll wager. You may have heard of his Playboy article from a few years prior: "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." Yeah, that one. I wrote a book on it, you know. The actual brothel, not King's article. In this issue King's piece is called "The Great Willie Nelson Commando Hoo-Ha and Texas Brain Fry." King's got a thing for titles, amirite? This one's ostensibly about the third Fourth of July picnic Nelson ever put on, but the thing with King is that he seldom actually writes much about what he purports to be writing about. Instead, he normally dicks around and misses most of said event, so resorts to writing about dicking around and exaggerating the hell out of the details he doesn't make up from scratch. Is it entertaining? Sure, but after reading two or three of his pieces you start to see the pattern. Sadly, Nelson doesn't make an appearance here, although fellow Outlaw Country star Jerry Jeff Walker does, sort of:

Friday Night Videos

Warning: The following contains concentrated 1980s. Proceed with caution.

In 1979, the disco group Lipps Inc. released the album Mouth to Mouth. Some months later, after the calendar had flipped over to 1980, "Funkytown" came out as the second single from the album and became a monster hit around the world, spending four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the U.S. alone. In any sane decade, that should've been the end of it. But this is the 1980s we're talking about, where common sense and good taste sledom entered the picture. Enter the Australian New Wave band, Pseudo Echo, the members of which collectively decided that it'd be a good idea to cover a disco song from just five years prior. And history proves they were right: Pseudo Echo's cover of "Funkytown" was also a worldwide hit (although it only made it to No. 6 on Billboard). I was there. I witnessed cover bands at dances cover the hit cover of the original. As someone on YouTube so eloquently put it, "Only in the 80's could an 80's band do a cover of another 80's song and make it more 80's."

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Bruce Willis.

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Reading Playboy for the articles: November 1977

My wife, Lisa, has acquired a large collection of vintage Playboy magazines. I'm flipping through those issues that catch my attention and offering my thoughts on the non-photographic content that filled its pages. You know, the articles.

Highlights: sigh. Okay, I will confess that this specific issue is the one that put the idea of revisting these old back issues for the editorial content into my mind. I mean, Billy Carter? The ultimate 1970s D-list celebrity scored a coveted Playboy interview? That. Is. Astonishing. My first decade of life was lived through the 1970s, and I remember Billy Carter as the president's idiot brother who went broke with a beer company. Neither of which, in hindsight, are true. A little digging revealed that Billy never ran a beer company, he only endorsed a novelty brand at one point. And he wasn't in the craft brew vanguard, either--he drank Pabst because it was cheap, and would happily trade that for anything cheaper. He also graduated from Emory, which isn't exactly a diploma mill. Back in the day, Billy earned a reputation as a type of redneck sage, bluntly telling it like it is with back country wisdom that left those on the receiving end steaming over his lack of diplomacy. In reality, I think Billy was just a mean drunk. He eventually went into rehab but only a few years sober cancer claimed him.

None of which is in the Playboy interview. Because there is no Playboy interview. In a duplicitous bait-and-switch, Playboy offers an article on Billy Carter, a cobbled-together hodgepodge written by Roy Blount Jr., vignettes and sound bites taken from a dozen different appearances by Billy and snatches of conversations with his family. The cover certainly doesn't promise a formal interview, but that is absolutely implied--especially given the fact this issue hit the newsstands exactly one year after the issue featuring brother Jimmy Carter's famed interview. It's a cheap stunt, is what it is, one that only reenforces the perception of Billy as cross between backwoods truth-teller and bumpkin beer-swiller. By the end, there's barely any new insight into his character than what we began with, although the following section began to approach something of substance:

"When did you get over being prejudiced?" I asked him the first time we talked. I assumed that he had gotten over it, since Miss Lillian and Jimmy said they had and since Billy had sued the members of the public school board to try to require them to send their children to public schools instead of to priveate segregated schools. "I'm still prejudiced, I guess," he said. "It would still bother me for my daughter to marry a black man."

...

Billy undoubtedly makes a point of avoiding anything resembling a lofty liberal pronouncement. After I got to know him better, though, he confided, "You're the first one I've ever told this. Why I left the city council. I ran in the first place to change the vote against me getting a beer license. I won and got the license and then I told everybody I was going to run again. So nobody else qualified against this black man. He was running for my post and everyone figured I'd beat him. The, when it was too late for anybody else to qualify, I withdrew and he got on. It was a flim-flam deal. I figured it was time the blacks got some representation."

Wow. I wouldn't consider that ethical behavior, but it is... interesting. My take is that Billy was more self-aware than he liked to admit. He wasn't able to overcome his ingrained racism on a personal level, give or take, but made efforts to overcome it on a societal level. If nothing else, he marched to the beat of his own drummer.

Which brings us to the actual interview in the issue, with Henry Kyemba. He's not exactly a household name these days, but at the time had freshly defected as a cabinet member from the brutal, murderous regime of dictator Idi Amin in Uganda. The interview is harrowing, to say the least:

Playboy: When did it become apparent that Amin's killings were not individual cases but mass murder?

Kyemba: That was not until late 1972

Playboy: And you started to see bodies at that stage?

Kyemba: Everybody started to see bodies. There were so many that they couldn't be buried, so they were dumped into the Nile. The main road that connects Kampala and Jinja passes over the River Nile. Thousands of people passed that place every day. Time and again, you would find bodies floating down from the source of the Nile, through the dam, and piling up in the still waters on one side. There was a boat on full-time duty removing the bodies. You would find people physically lifting those rotten, ballooned-out bodies from the river.

Playboy: Why do you think they were thrown into the river rather than into the lake?

Kyemba: That was one of the stupid things that Amin's boys did. Obviously, they thought that by dumping them into the river they would be eaten quickly by the crocodiles. They did not realize that once they dumped the bodies in such numbers, the crocodiles could not eat them all. Nor did they think that the bodies would be floating, all puffed up, to the surface. I saw bodies that were left on the riverside for days, because people became hardened to the sight. Then Amin announced on the Ugandan radio that all those bodies must be removed by teh police as soon as they appeared. He accused the police of being lazy because they were not removing them fast enough!

Other thoughts: This issue contains Playboy's inaugural college basketball preview, accompanied by a ridiculously distorted two-page spread of the 1977-78 pre-season All-American team. I mean, what were they thinking to elongate the photo to make the already-tall players look taller? I mean, that's something a high school newspaper would do. It is interesting to note a very young Larry Bird second from the right, long before his glory years with the Boston Celtics. The pre-season top 10 is mostly a mix of the usual suspects with a couple of outliers sprinkled in for interest: 1) North Carolina, 2) Kentucky, 3) San Francisco, 4) Marquette, 5) Purdue, 6) Arkansas, 7) Kansas State, 8) Alabama, 9) Minnesota, 10) Notre Dame.

Finally, this ad. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, what the hell is going on with this ad? This is the stuff of nightmares, people. Is there any doubt why Dingo boots pretty much came and went with the 70s? The only good thing I thing I can say about a magazine that contains an interview focused on Idi Amin and an ad featuring a three-legged O.J. Simpson is that both of the men in question are now dead. I suppose that is unkind to Simpson, as the evidence would suggest that he killed fewer people that Amin.

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Friday Night Videos

I'm not going to pretend Bruce Willis had the strongest voice or that his 1980s album The Return of Bruno was anything other than a vanity project. But the man had good taste in music and recorded (mostly) songs that suited his limited range. And there's no denying he looks like he's having a blast in the video for "Young Blood." I still own this album today and I'm not about to get rid of it.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Marcia Ball.

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