Easter

Up until now I’ve never done a blog on Easter!  That oversight will now be corrected.  Easter is the Christian religious holiday celebrating Jesus’ death and resurrection, which follows several weeks of Lent.  Here’s Easter 101.

Cast of Characters

Jesus Christ.  Son of God. 

Peter.  Top Apostle, first Pope, denies Jesus 3 times.

Judas.  Bottom Apostle.  Betrays Jesus to the high priests for silver coins which he promptly discards and then hangs himself. 

Pontius Pilate.  The Roman governor who sentences Jesus to death, then washes his hands of the whole thing.  Sometimes played by Gary Oldman or Michael Palin.

Important Dates Etc

Fat Tuesday.  The Tuesday before Ash Wednesday.  Since Lent will begin the next day (Ash Wednesday) (see below on Lent) this is the last day to indulge in all those naughty things you’ve promised yourself you’ll give up for Lent.  Carnival (see below) takes Fat Tuesday, in time and concept, and stretches it out a few days.

Ash Wednesday.  The beginning of Lent.   You’re supposed to go to mass in the middle of the week and the get black ashes smudged on your forehead.  Easter falls on a different Sunday each year due to some lunar deal the Church decided on and no one knows why.  Since the days work back from Easter, Ash Wednesday also falls on a different date each year, but it’s always a Wednesday.

Lent.  Approximately 6 weeks between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday during which time the priest wears the same cool purple robes as Advent but we have to give up something and won’t be looking forward to a load of presents at the end.   What you “give up” for Lent is up to each individual, but it should be something substantial, like fast food or beer, and not something like opium or robbing convenience stores, something you aren’t doing anyway.  My dad said that for the purpose of Lent, Sundays didn’t count, but I thought that was a cop-out, so I’d follow the restriction all the way until Easter Sunday.

Palm Sunday.  The Sunday before Easter Sunday.  It’s about Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey, and the enthusiastic Jesus fans strew palms in front of his way, so at church we clutch a small palm and wave it around at each other.  Keeping it around is a good way to alert people that you’re Catholic.

Holy Thursday.  The day of the Last Supper, when Jesus announced to the Apostles that He would be leaving them soon, to honor Him with bread and water (body and blood), and that one of them (could it be...Judas?) would betray him.

Good Friday.  The day Jesus was crucified.  That means nailed on a cross to suffer a long, painful death.

Easter Sunday.  Three days later Jesus came back to life.  For the next 40 days He stuck around. 

Ascension.  After those 40 days, Jesus went back upstairs.  It’s celebrated on a Sunday, but no one really does much about it.

Carnival.  You may have seen this most recently in “RIO”.  Guess what?  It’s an Easter thing!   Yes, that includes both the Rio de Janeiro, Brazil festival and New Orleans’ festivities which they call Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday).  Typically it starts the Friday before Ash Wednesday and ends on Fat Tuesday, but the Brazilians have to top everyone by continuing the debauchery onto Ash Wednesday itself.  Note that São Paulo, Recife, Salvador, and other cities in Brazil have their own Carnival – though Rio’s is the biggest and most famous – and other places around the world do it too.   Cologne, Germany has one they’re proud of, though you’ll find German tourists in Rio for Carnival.  Remember, Mardi Gras is New Orleans, not Rio.   

    Although I’ve been to Rio five times, one was the winter (June-July), twice was New Year’s Eve, and the remaining two times were up to a week before Carnival, so I’ve never been there for Carnival itself.  However, the blocos – drunken street parties – do begin a week before Carnival and I have enjoyed those.  The Carnival parades feature a nonstop array of painted naked bodies, samba school hinos (theme songs) repeated over and over again, and an orgy of noise and confetti, as I call it, a psychedelic sex parade.  Cariocas (natives of Rio) would have you believe that for Carnival, the entire city shuts down and everyone is continuously drunk, on drugs, having sex, etc. literally nonstop without sleep from Friday to Wednesday.  That includes the two blue birds.

Basket & Bunny.  Instead of lots of presents like at Christmas, traditionally in the US, Easter means the Easter Bunny – like Santa, completely divorced from any Biblical basis – brings candy.  Right, after fasting for all this time, your reward is chocolate and candy.  This is probably a big reason why Easter isn’t as popular as Christmas.  That and the morbidness of the crucifixion.

Movies.  Unlike Christmas, the movies on an Easter topic are far more faithful to the Jesus-On-A-Cross idea.  The Easter Bunny doesn’t compel our attention nearly as much as Santa does.  I’d say the big three for Easter movies, in my opinion, are:

1)         The Passion.  Mel Gibson’s movie, in Aramaic with subtitles (because we ALL speak Aramaic, right?) gets it really down and dirty, gritty, violent, the whole nine yards.  If you want it REAL, this is the one to watch.  You may be inclined to give up everything for Lent after watching this – or take your self-imposed restrictions that much more seriously.  On the other hand, it is difficult to watch, it’s very long, and it’s in Aramaic.  I can’t imagine anyone watching it more than once. 

2)         Ben Hur.  For epic-ness, look no further.  While Jesus isn’t the star of this one, Charlton Heston’s portrayal – and that bad-ass chariot race – really do the job nicely.  Warning, though, it’s a LONG film.  The 1925 silent version is worth checking out, just out of curiosity, but the 1959 version is the definite winner.

3)         Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.  Here’s a delightfully humorous view, which falls short of blasphemy.  Please note: Brian (Graham Chapman) is NOT Jesus.  Fun bits:  “Blessed are the cheesemakers”, “Romani ite domum” x100, “The Judean People’s Front!” and of course “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life”.  Arguably it tops “Holy Grail.” 

** Please note: PASSOVER is a Jewish holiday which happens to fall around Easter.   That’s about the Jews leaving Egypt, so watch “The Ten Commandments” instead of “Ben Hur”. 

There you have it.  After the Easter there’s Ascension, Pentecost, and then we wait for Advent again (usually first Sunday after Thanksgiving) for Christmas.  If you didn’t know before, you do now.

Red Plenty, American Road Trip, and Seven League Boots

I recently finished reading two books, and re-read portions of a third. 

Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford, is a recent publication.  Aside from some small parts taking place in the 1930s and 1970s, the majority of the book takes place from 1959 to 1965.  It’s a lengthy (not too long) analysis in narrative form about the Soviet economy in the Krushchev era.   The best and brightest Soviet economists and mathematicians believed that if they found the right algorithms and mainframes they could replace supply and demand of the capitalist market economy with an efficiently planned economy.  Answer?  Well, we know they couldn’t handle that and by the 1970s (Brezhnev era) the Soviets had given up.  I liked one character – a “fixer” (almost like a “NEP-Man” who “gets things done”) - and one reference to a Western slam on the Soviet economy as a “permanent seller’s market.” 70% of the book is the narrative, followed by a full 30% of extremely detailed and illuminating footnotes.   If you’re curious about how and why the Soviet experiment failed, from an economic perspective, this is a good book to read.

Ilif & Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers.  It’s mentioned in the footnotes to Red Plenty, so I decided to check it out myself.  Because half the material is photographs it was fairly quick and easy to read: I finished it in one day.

Basically it’s a photo essay of two Soviets who went from New York to California and back in 1935 and took pictures.  They were on assignment from Stalin to tell a story about America for ordinary Russians back home, something along the lines of “it’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”  New York and L.A. are crucified as plastic places, Hollywood as a factory for terrible films, and Americans are racist against blacks.  They also accuse Americans of being a country full of morons who mindlessly accept 100% of commercial advertising and Hollywood movies.  There are no “theaters” in America, only movie houses for the terrible films, so Americans are presumably “nekulturny” (uncultured).  So they’re also trying to make ordinary Russian workers and peasants feel superior to Americans.  I started out enjoying the book until I saw the trend emerge.  The first half is actually pretty complimentary, but as the book goes on the insults pile up.   While some are astute and reasonable, they pass that point halfway through and then veer off into “stupid American” territory – and never come back. 

“One story” refers to small town America where the towns are all the same and they don’t have multiple story skyscrapers like they do in New York or Chicago.  “If you’ve seen one of these small towns you’ve seen them all.”  They were also highly amused by the American habit of naming many such towns after large, better known European cities, e.g. Moscow, Ohio.  They did acknowledge that St. Petersburg, Florida, is actually a fairly large city. 

You know how we laugh when the Chinese or Iranian state agencies cluelessly pick up Onion articles and report them as true?  Well, these clownskis did the same: an ad for Boners, a Dr. Suess-illustrated collection of the funniest “stuff kids say” (the book is still around, you can check many of the hilarious entries on Amazon.com) simply pulled out the quote, “Revolution is a form of government abroad”.  These two idiots thought Americans really believe that. 

Seven League Boots.  I had to follow this up with re-reading portions of another book, Seven League Boots, by Richard Halliburton.   Indeed, that book arguably deserves a blog entry of its own, but I’ll cover it here, because among many other topics, Halliburton covers the Soviet Union – at almost exactly the same time as Comrades Beavis & Butt-head were touring the US collecting their literary fertilizer – Communist propaganda – masquerading as a travelogue.  

The range of topics of this book is remarkable.  Halliburton, who was an American adventurer-journalist in the 1930s, apparently did the following: met with AND spoke to Ermakov, the surviving Bolshevik who murdered the Romanovs in Sverdlovsk in July 1918 AND burned off and disposed of the whole family’s bodies – thus finally confirming what sensible people knew, i.e. Anastasia died there and did not escape; went to Ethiopia and spoke to Haile Selassie himself; visited the castle of Henri Christophe, Haiti’s short-lived dictator in the early nineteenth century; rented an elephant (!) and retraced Hannibal’s journey across the Alps into Italy; and even – unsuccessfully – attempted to enter Mecca despite being an infidel.  These are just some of the adventures he describes in his book.

            But it was his visit to Stalin’s Russia in 1935 which interested me.  As I said, the flip side of the Soviet idiots.  He met Comrade Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow.  He married his interpreter and immediately divorced her – an experiment to demonstrate the USSR’s liberal divorce laws.  He visited ballet and circus schools.  He visited Leningrad, Moscow, and other places in the USSR. 

            And what was Halliburton’s impression?  Well, he was impressed that so many women were working at men’s jobs.  He was impressed with the circus school.  That was about it.  The regime’s brutality, its censorship, the consistent poverty – a deliberate result of the regime’s policies – and overall drabness of the cities and the people, and also this business of destroying Russia’s vast culture in a heartbeat for this “social experiment on the lives of 160 million Russians”, who are forbidden to leave, to speak out, to protest, to accumulate any wealth or private property, to learn about the outside world or about Russia prior to 1917 – the sum total of the Soviet regime’s totalitarian nature, horrified him.  Of course he was also shocked at the hypocrisy of Soviet propaganda against the United States – much of which can be read first-hand in the Ilif & Petrov book. 

            This is even more remarkable because Halliburton had a fairly open mind about Russia.  He was bending over backwards to find positive things to observe and acknowledge.  He also hoped – even perhaps expected – that in 20-30 years, the worst excesses of the regime would be over, that Russian society would be more like ours, and that in this time we ourselves would be more socialist and thus the two countries and societies would converge.  Alas, he died in 1939, trying to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco, so he never lived to see the reality as depicted in Red Plenty.

                While the Soviet Union I saw in 1983 was doubtless different than the one Halliburton saw in 1935, the similarities are more significant than the differences.   And vicariously, these three publications complement each other for an illuminating contrast of America and the USSR.

Gibson Firebird

Ages ago, an automotive advice column got some feedback from a reader.  “You told that man having problems with his Firebird that he should contact General Motors.  You should have told him to contact Ford.”  Apparently the reader was confusing the Pontiac Firebird (made by GM) with the Ford Thunderbird (made by Ford).  However, the guitar world has the Gibson Firebird and the bass equivalent, the Thunderbird, also made by Gibson.  And Fender makes both the Jaguar and Mustang, models considerably less popular than the Stratocaster or Telecaster, although Kurt Cobain liked the Mustang – and much less popular as guitars than the auto equivalents are, of course.  Confused yet?  Good, because it gets better.

In 1963, following up its replacement of the Les Paul with new models – the SG, the Explorer, and the Flying V – Gibson watered down the Explorer into the Firebird, designed by Ray Dietrich, who normally designed cars: Packard and Lincoln.   These models were the so-called “reverse” models.  The body looks like an Explorer radically toned down with a reverse headstock and chrome mini-humbuckers.  Rare among Gibsons – indeed, among guitars – the Firebird has “neck through body” construction, meaning the neck and middle of the body are all one piece.  Fenders have bolt-on necks (removable and replaceable) while most Gibsons (e.g. SGs and Les Pauls) have glued in necks.  The tuners were originally banjo tuners which went straight through the headstock and turned from behind, rather than from the side like regular tuners. 

Nonreverse.   Soon after the reverse model came out, Fender bitched and hollered, so Gibson changed to the “nonreverse” model, which to my eyes looks even MORE like a Fender than the reverse style - especially since they went from a reverse headstock (generally unique to the Firebird) with a regular 6-in-line headstock very similar to Fenders; some of the last reverse body Firebirds from 1965 (the transition year) actually have nonreverse headstocks.  Go figure.   The standard pickup on the nonreverse seems to be the single-coil P90s, sometimes with minihumbuckers (e.g. the Firebird X, see below). 

Since the sixties, Gibson has reissued the nonreverse model a few times, but reissued the reverse model far more often, so that the latter is effectively the standard Firebird model.   Gibson used Roman numerals to designate the individual reverse Firebird models, I = one pickup and dot inlays, III = two pickups, no vibrato, trapezoid inlays, V = two pickups, vibrato, trapezoid inlays, VII = three pickups, vibrato, and block inlays (i.e. a Firebird “Custom”).  As reissued the V wound up as the standard, without a vibrato.   There’s also the Firebird X, a modern nonreverse version with a 3x3 headstock, and the Firebird Studio, which uses regular humbuckers.  

For 2014, Gibson is still selling reverse Firebirds, although now only in cherry, classic white, and tobacco sunburst.  There are two signature models, the Eliot Easton (guitarist for the Cars) signature model in Gold Mist with humbuckers and a Bigsby vibrato, and just now the Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (Steely Dan) signature model in copper.   Funny, Easton more often plays SGs, and I’ve never seen Baxter play a Firebird.  That’s like an Angus Young signature Strat.

Pickups.  In addition to its neck-through-body construction and reverse headstock, another unique feature of the Firebird is the pickups.  While they look similar in shape and size to the minihumbuckers Gibson started putting in late 60s Les Paul Deluxes - themselves a stockpile of Epiphone pickups the company inherited when it bought Epiphone - they are a different design and sound different from minihumbuckers.  While PAFs, P90s, and other Gibson pickups appear on multiple models, the Firebird is the only Gibson with a pickup specific to the model. 

Mini Humbucker Versus Firebird Guitar Pickups: What’s the Difference? – Humbucker Soup 

The Firebird pickups give the guitar a sound which is closer to a single-coil sound, but not quite – I’m actually not personally familiar with P90s to compare.  In 2010 the banjo tuners were replaced by Steinberger models. From what I can tell among the Firebird owners on Facebook, as of 2020 the Steinberger tuners are the most popular, even more so than the original banjo models, which seem to be preferred only for pure nostalgia and not playability.  https://guitarchitecture.org/2010/10/13/steinberger-gearless-tuners-review/

Famous Players:  Johnny Winter, Paul Stanley (KISS), and Allen Collins (Lynyrd Skynyrd) are the most commonly associated with the reverse model.  I’ve seen Eric Clapton, James Hetfield and Gary Moore playing them, albeit rarely.  For a short time, Dave Grohl was playing Firebirds in Pelham Blue while in the Foo Fighters.  Stanley has a Washburn signature model which copies the Firebird.  Brian Jones was playing a reverse model briefly, and Keith Richards played a nonreverse. 

My Own.  In 2014 I had a surplus of time and money, and at yet another visit to Chuck Levin’s in Wheaton, Maryland, saw an ebony Firebird V (brand new 2013 model) and fell in love immediately.  As a V model, it has the trapezoid inlays, two Firebird pickups, and as a 2013, the Steinberger tuners.  More recently I replaced the pickguard with an ebony model, still with the Firebird symbol.  It’s definitely a fun guitar to play, and if anyone wants another unique Gibson to add to their collection, by all means, choose this one – though I’d recommend getting a model with the Firebird pickups and Steinberger tuners.

Through The Never

Recently I saw Metallica’s most recent “concert movie”, Through The Never.   It’s 80% concert film and 20% “goofy story about a roadie who fights bad people.”  Something like that.  Something gay, stupid, irrelevant, and only meant to pull an iota of attention away from the band so it’s not just a concert movie, which in fact it is.

            It would be tempting to claim that Metallica “jumped the shark” after Cliff Burton died in 1986, but that would ignore how important …And Justice For All was, and I still maintain that Metallica (the self-titled fifth album, aka “The Black Album”) is really just more of the same, just a little less self-indulgent.  It’s like with Def Leppard:  compare High N’Dry to Pyromania, and the latter looks more commercial.  But compare both to Hysteria….Anyhow.   For all his issues, Jason Newsted really wasn’t all that bad a bassist, even if he wasn’t Cliff.

            But from Load through Death Man-getic, Metallica has been….plastic….insincere….phony.   The distortion is still on, but the real-ness is gone.   “Some Kind of Monster”?   Difficult to watch or endure, but if the movie’s intent was to assure the fans that the band was still “real”, it didn’t work.   Oddly, I don’t find Lulu, their collaboration with Lou Reed, as part of this; ironically, their most “commercial” effort also looks like their most sincere, and the other albums, while indeniably heavy and thrashy, still have a barely articulable yet nonetheless perceptible and discernable phoniness.   The haircuts and Kirk’s guyliner simply put into a picture what a 1,000 song lyric words couldn’t accomplish.

            Finally, there’s that business of the “roadie” (probably a professional stuntman) catching fire during the show and being put out, followed by the band pretending to be back in their shithole in San Francisco in the early days – back when Dave Mustaine was the lead guitarist and Cliff was still helping to call the shots.   It takes no imagination to figure that if Cliff was still with the band, none of the Load >> Death Man-getic crap would have happened.  There would be no “Some Kind of Monster”.  And had they tried to pull it off anyway, Cliff would have joined Megadeth.   Why isn’t “Cliff ‘Em All” on Blu-ray?  Is it because much of the source material is so low budget and crappy, or is it because they want to forget that period?   

            We saw Metallica at Donington in 1985 – with Cliff Burton.  It was the Ride The Lightning tour, and they were early on the bill.  The crowd was throwing dirt, bottles, beer, piss, whatever they could get their hands on.  You’re throwing shit at CLIFF BURTON?  Shame on you.   Were you also singing along with Fish later on?  Probably.  Well then, you should love Lulu.