Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

A good stretch for a change for the Mets

I'd been taking a break from Mets, staying away during the Yankees series, because they'd been making me nuts.

The collapse of the rotation was hard to watch, and the lack of consistent hitting was just painful.

Then again, a couple of wins — four straight to be exact — are tonic, especially against the club's two big rivals.

Reyes and Bay are starting to hit and Santana and Pelfrey have gotten some help from a couple of unexpected sources.

And once again us Met fans are riding the upward stretch of the rollercoaster.

I'll take it while it's there.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Too little? I hope it’s not too late

The gulf Coast oil spill is not President Barack Obama’s Katrina, but it has been damaging nonetheless, so damaging, in fact, that the mea culpa he offered this afternoon just doesn’t seem enough.

The president said he was the man responsible and that mistakes have been made. The biggest one, he acknowledges, was not moving

more aggressively to clean up what he called a cozy and corrupt relationship between regulators and industry, suggesting that the disaster might have been prevented if steps were taken sooner.

“Obviously they weren’t happening fast enough,” he said. “If they were happening fast enough, this might have been caught.”

No shit. That’s what critics from the left — like David Sirota and others — have been saying for a while. While the president and his administration have been involved and focused from the beginning — in a way that George Bush never was when Katrina hit — he has done what too many in Washington (and the state capitals do): He’s let industry clean up the mess, which is like asking an 8-year-old to clean his room. It’ll get done, but no one is ever sure when.

The problem from the beginning — which the president should have known — is that industry just doesn’t care what kind of messes it creates as long as it can generate profit. It takes aggressive action on the part of the people, through their government, to keep these greedheads honest and keep us safe and healthy.

Obama has tweaked around the edges when it comes to this — on Wall Street reform, on the cleanup, on just about everything — rather than strip our corporate overlords of their power. And progressives have let him get away with it.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Thoughts on double albums and the Exile reissue

I picked up the reissue of Exile on Main Street, the classic double album that I’ve always viewed as the Rolling Stones‘ last masterpiece. (The band has released some real good music since — much of the ’70s catalogue, Some Girls, Emotional Rescue, Tattoo You, A Bigger Bang — but nothing with the sustained brilliance of Exile.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/28107384001?isVid=1

The decision to buy the reissue was not taken lightly because I generally am not one who likes to spend money on music I already own, but the band’s inclusion of a 10-song second disc, with a brilliant alternate take of “Loving Cup” and a couple of unfinished songs now finished by the band, altered the normal calculus.

This is an album that the so-called jam bands should study, a loose, instinctive romp through a highly personal take on American blues, R&B and country by a band at the absolute height of its powers.

The remastering is a plus — the sound is vibrant and electric — but it is the other material that made it a worthwhile purchase. (Apparently, the rarities disc has been released separately, as well, so people uninterested in the remastered album an still get the material; there also is a weird collector’s box that includes the rarities disc and a T-shirt — leave it to the Stones to milk it for all the cash it can generate.)

In any case, the reissue is not a disappointment, though it is not on a par with Let It Be … Naked, the interesting and flawed rethinking of The Beatles’ Let It Be issued a few years ago (that offered a few good alternate takes, including a cleaner, less sappy “Long and Winding Road,” new sequencing and a new edit of “Get Back” that strips it of the chatter).

Nonetheless, the release got me thinking about the double album, something that has become unusual in the digital age. The few double discs worth buying — Wilco’s Being There, Nellie McKay’s first two, Outkast’s Speaker Boxxx/Love Below, Sonic Youth, a handful of others — are rare because the compact disc allowed artists to go much longer. Think of all the discs out there with 70 minutes of music, a time span that would have required two vinyl records back in the old days.

Exile is, for me, one of the great examples of the double album, easily in the top three of studio doubles (as compared with double live albums, which were more prevalent). Off the top of my head, this is my top 10 — understanding that I probably forgot something and that I’ve used 1990 as an arbitrary cutoff:

  1. Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde
  2. Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
  3. The Clash, London Calling
  4. Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland
  5. The Beatles, The Beatles (the white album)
  6. Derek & the Dominoes, Layla
  7. Bruce Springsteen, The River
  8. Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
  9. Prince, 1999
  10. Funkadelic, America Eats Its Young

Other notables: Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; Genesis, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway; PiL, Second Edition; Erik Burdon and War, The Black Man’s Burden; The Who, Tommy and Quadrophenia; Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life; XTC’s English Settlement and Oranges and Lemons.

Some notable doubles not included: James Brown, Sex Machine (it is live); George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, which would have been on the list except that it includes a third disc of jamming; The Clash, Sandanista! (a triple album); and material by Frank Zappa, who I can appreciate but have never connected with.

Some readers will note the exclusion of Pink Floyd’s The Wall — an album that many view as a masterpiece but that I think is incredibly pretentious and overrated. Those are fighting words, I know, so let the battles begin.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Drill, spill and drill again

The Gulf slowly dies, sufficated by BP’s massive spill, and yet nothing of substance changes.

In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.

The records also indicate that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits, most of which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Asked about the permits and waivers, officials at the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates drilling, pointed to public statements by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reiterating that the agency had no intention of stopping all new oil and gas production in the gulf.

Department of the Interior officials said in a statement that the moratorium was meant only to halt permits for the drilling of new wells. It was not meant to stop permits for new work on existing drilling projects like the Deepwater Horizon.

And so it goes in the United States of America — a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil industry.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.