I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ROSANNE CASH-Tiny Desk Concert #894 (September 23, 2019)

I don’t know all that much about Rosanne Cash (I couldn’t recall how she was related to Johnny).  I also assumed that she would be a country artist.  Yet this set is anything but country.  But I guess the key to that is that her voice isn’t country at all, it’s just good.

This blurb also blows my mind a bit about how quickly (or not) they post concerts.  This show was posted in September but was recorded in January–she had to wait quite a while to see it.

Rosanne Cash and her band arrived at NPR to play the Tiny Desk on a freezing cold, bright sunny day in January — one of those brittle, crystal clear winter days when the snow reflects the sun and there’s nowhere to hide from the light. Her intense performance had that same balance of heat and ice.

Cash plays four songs

most taken from her 2018 album She Remembers Everything, have a lot of emotional heat, but they’re shaped and sculpted by the wry wisdom of age and experience. More than at any time in her career, her spirit and approach to performance these days reflects the influence of her father, the legendary country singer Johnny Cash.

“She Remembers Everything” opens with John Leventhal on with Rosanne on acoustic guitar.  Like most of these songs, it feels slow and powerful–kind of bluesy with a dramatic chord progression.  Mid song, Leventhal switches to guitar and plays a great little solo.

When the song is over she praises everyone: “So attentive.  Like a listening room at the NPR offices.”

Up next is “The Only Thing Worth Fighting” which she co-wrote with T Bone Burnett and Lyra Lynn  This song is not so much country as western-sounding.  There’s more nice guitar work from Leventhal.

Zev Katz on bass and Dan Rieser on drums don’t do anything to single them out except for keeping the songs moving properly.  The bass does do some nice lines, but mostly, these are simple songs which need little accompaniment.

For “Everyone But Me” she takes off the guitar.  This is a lovely piano ballad after which she says, “I don’t know if the young people can relate to this song but it means more as you get older.”

The last song is from her album The River and the Thread.  She says the album won a Grammy and the last time she won a Grammy, Ronald Reagan was president.  From this she plays the cool bluesy “A Feather’s Not A Bird.”

This isn’t the kind of music I enjoyed, but I liked this Tiny Desk Concert a lot more than I thought I would based on what I thought I knew about Rosanne Cash.

[READ: August 26, 2019] The Adventures of Barry & Joe

After the election that has sent the country spiraling into a level of hell, Adam Reid wanted to do something to make decent-thinking people laugh.

When I saw first saw this, I assumed that Adam Reid was Adam Reed, the creator of Archer and other delightfully dark cartoons.  It took a while for me to realize that he isAdam Reid who is responsible for The Tiny Chef Show.

Aside from that, I don’t really have any familiarity with him.  So that’s kind of interesting, I suppose.

Adam Reid created a Kickstarter campaign for his Barry & Joe The Animated Series.  Which is what exactly?

Moments after the inauguration of the forty-fifth President, Barack Obama and his best friend Joe Biden were escorted to a secret lab, run by a team of the world’s greatest scientists and occasionally Elon Musk.

Obama and Biden were asked to take off all of their clothes and hold very still in a fetal position until they felt a painful tingling sensation.

They would awake to find themselves inside of their younger selves. Driven to find each other, and together, change history for the better.

Their only guide on this journey is Neil deGrasse Tyson. A brilliant scientist from the present who appears in the form of an augmented reality that only they can see and hear.

And so they find themselves leaping throughout their own lifetime. Looking for the best in people… Striving to right injustice wherever they find it. Forever hoping that their next jump in time will take them to a future that’s not scary and fucked up.

A world which they can proudly call… home.

The Kickstarter was funded and while the series has not seen the light of day yet, this book has.

This is more or less the series as comic book/play/short story and several other things.

I decided that as soon as I heard that Biden was going to run for president in 2020, that I had to read this book before he did something to make me hate him (Biden is currently my fourth or fifth choice).  He’s done quite a few regrettable things as I write this, but nothing wholly egregious.  In fact, he hasn’t done anything, so his popularity in the polls is a bit mystifying–aside from people who desperately miss Obama.

The book opens with “Pretentious temporal anecdotes from the author.”

Adam talks about loving Quantum Leap (which serves as a basis for many of the visuals of the book).  He talks about November 4, 2008, a great day in America politics.  And then on November 9, 2016 “I wake up to find our worst election fears have been realized overnight.”

I’ve been holding back from developing The Adventures of Barry & Joe out of fear that it was too weird, too deeply silly, too pathetically nostalgic, too ridiculous to be a thing. But then the reality of ***** happened.

True Bromance
Comic No. 1 begins moments after the inauguration of the fifty-fifth “president.”
Written by Adam Reid
Art: Joe St. Pierre; Color: Anwar Hanano; Lettering: Dezi Sienty

Barry & Joe are asked to make one more sacrifice for our country.  The leading scientists have created this time machine kind of gadget which puts their current personality in their old selves.  They are going to be guided by Samuel L. Jackson (instead of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, after that sexual allegation).  It is the plot for the pilot to come.

All the President’s Zen
The guys arrive in 1978, find each other, get a burger and make a few decisions about what reality they want to live in.

This is a narrative story written by “IBM’s Watson IV.”  They had back to when Barack Obama was 17.  Barry is pretty happy to be back in time when things were good and Mr. Burger was still around.  But he knows they have work to do.

Fellowship of the Social Justice Warrior All-Stars
Looking for a sense of purpose in 1980s New York, Joe gets all up in Barry’s grill.

This time they jump to December 6, 1980.  Barack Obama, used to flying anywhere in Air Force One is now 19 and can barely afford a one way ticket to LAX in coach.  Joe tells Barack that **ump has hijacked history and he is outraged.

Barry says, “What do you want me to do.  Should we go hunt down young Donald and beat the shit out of him?”
“Yeah.  That sounds like fun to me.  Lets go do that.”  Joe had a wild look in his eyes.

The sequence in which young/old Barack calls young Michele for the first time is pretty hilarious–he tells her the truth: how they meet that she will be first lady and they will have two kids.

But the action comes with John Lennon.
“Holy hell, that happens tomorrow…at the Dakota.” Joe said.  “I get to kick the crap out of Mark David Chapman, don’t I?”

101 Dimensions
An incomplete catalog of 101 adventures salvaged from a brighter timeline than the one you;re currently in.

101 episodes with titles n synopses like:

Blue Birds–Barry & Joe arrive in a world where the Donald never existed… yet everyone talks and tweets just like him. Sad!
The River Mild–Barry & Joe go whitewater rafting and save a family from evil Kevin Bacon.
We Go (Very High)–Obama and Biden travel to the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam where they are forced to become judges or risk tearing a hole in space-time.

Humanity War Part 1-Eternal Sunshine of the Trumpless Mind!
Part one of a 2 part comic that finds Barack entering Joe’s dream world to save him from himself when a procedure to erase all signs of **ump from Joe’s mind goes horribly wrong
Writer: Adam Reid; Art: Ed Laroche; Colors: James Rochelle; Letters: Michael Heisler

This comic even includes a parody of that Batman Ssapping Robin panel with Barack slapping Biden and saying Wake the fuck up, Joe!

Night of the Living Democrats
Proceed at your own risk (lots of moaning and whining)

A short story in which dembies (zombies meet Democrats) are attacking.  There’s lots of whining sounds.  I love that Reid is taking the piss out of Liberals and democrats in this one.  But that the fate of the world is in the hands of rednecks who didn’t vote for Obama

Bromantica
A sacrilegious portrait gallery filled with bromantic wonders with parodies from:
Titanic
Simon & Garfunkel (this one is awesome)
The Blues Brothers
The Odd Couple
Butch & Sundance
Kirk and Spock

Obama the Grey
This story is very much ripped off from I Am Legend and The Road with shades of Caddyshack

Barack is golfing across the country.  Hit a ball and walk after it.  What else can he do in the utter wasteland that has become America?  While he is travelling along he encounters a pack of robot dogs.  He fights them and dismantles nearly all of them, but one, the one with blue eyes, follows him unthreateningly. Could it be Robiden?  And who is creating these robot dogs to destroy Obama?  It is be Donald Jr-appearing very much like his father before him–only jaundiced and hairless (fortunately there are no picturers of this).

Humanity War Part II–Joe’s Last Stand
Part two finds our heroes with superpowers and battling the Order of Bigots alongside the All-Americans: Notorous RBG, Ernest Hemingway, Muhammad Ali, Harriet Tubman, George Washington and Hunter S Thompson (?).

RBG wields the invincible collar of truth and the giant gavel of equality; George Washington gets a laser musket and real teeth;  Muhammad Ali gets Vibranium Gloves.  They meet a villain who looks an awful lot like Dick Cheney.

I love that the end of the book has a real-looking comic book ad for Barry & Joe Adult Daily Vitamins: Hope Chewables.

Story: Adam Reid; Cover Art Denny Ficke; Art Keith Conroy; Color Jason Narvaez; Lettering Dezi Sienty

Meet Iron Biden & Rambama

Barry and Joe in the Ribbon of Possibility: Multiverse Edition
A stage play about friendship and tearing the fabric of space-time for what you believe in.

This is a rather strange three-act play with rotating scenes.  This story more than any of the others was way out there.  On a spaceship in the distant future, our older heroes encounter their actual younger selves–the ones who don’t know about the present yet.  How will they react to each other?

The Hall of Missed Opportunities
You don’t want to know

Quantum Consciousness for Beginners
Science is real; the concepts in this book are not.  In case you don’t know the difference, please use this glossary.

Acknowledgements and a Few Regrets

Overall I enjoyed this book. It was pretty fun and did give an outlet for some serious kvetching.  Some of the pieces were a little long.  And some of them were just a little silly.  But overall the premise was pretty neat and I could fully get behind the concept.

I think it would be much more enjoyable as a TV show, though.