Just a little west of Middleburg, a little north of Upperville and right under the shadow of Mount Weather is the village of Bluemont–also the site of the annual Bluemont Fair which features donkey rides, arts & crafts and, if my memory serves me, a real organ grinder with a monkey.
This year they’re doing a local author’s table and I’ve been asked to bring copies of Operation EMU.
September 20th and 21st. Be there or be square.
Before I even started watching The Passing Show - The Life & Music of Ronnie Lane, I knew about the man’s money problems. Growing up, the only Ronnie Lane songs I knew were the few I’d heard on Pete Townshend’s Who Came First and Rough Mix, collaborations that had only occurred because Lane had approached Townshend for money. Instead of giving him cash, Townshend asked Lane if he had any songs. It turns out he did: “April Fool,” one of his best, not to mention “Annie” and “Nowhere to Run.” And they made a superb album together with Charlie Watts, Eric Clapton, John Entwistle and a bunch of other dudes.
Anyway. The Ronnie Lane documentary explains the source of those money problems. (a) Lane spent most of his Faces-era earnings on a mobile recording studio (in an Airstream, no less) and (b) he abandoned the Faces abruptly in 1973 when he felt the band had lost its soul. According to the film’s interviews with Pete Townshend, whose hangdog face, stubbly beard, cockney accent and bleak perspective make him seem like a character from Bleak House, Ronnie Lane didn’t make a “brass farthing” from his first band the Small Faces and not much more from the Faces. But, according to Townshend, if he’d stuck around with Rod Stewart, Ron Wood, Kenney Jones, et al., he would have made himself a “nice little rockstar existence” from publishing. Very practical, but not Ronnie Lane’s style.
He lived, instead, on a ramshackle farm with his new wife, her kids, their kids and a ragamuffin group of hippies grilling sausages on fire-heated pans outside of caravan trailers. Shirtless, drinking something called ‘barley wine’ from tin mugs and yawning and scratching their heads with cigarettes in their fingers. Then he formed a band called The Slim Chance, appeared on Top of the Pops a few times dressed like a hobo, wrote some songs, was diagnosed with MS, moved to Texas and died in Colorado.
In spite of some strange interviewees, including his stepdaughter, who’s shot sitting on a desolate moor holding a prostrate nine year-old, The Passing Show fails to inspire a pathetic, Crumb-like gloss. (I think it’s shot on VHS.) Nevertheless, it’s far and away better than Shine a Light, the Martin Scorsese documentary on the Rolling Stones. What could have been low-key and spare turned out to be kind of hyped-up and (God, I hate to use the word) masturbatory. Mick Jagger preening in his hotel room and belittling the concert’s set designer, Ron Wood aping around the stage and hugging Hillary Clinton’s mother like one of those smarmy dudes in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, and Martin Scorsese lapsing into complete Woody Allenization as he moans and groans and slaps his forehead over where to place his cameramen because those pesky Stones won’t decide on a set list!
I know. This is a total waste of time. But, maybe it was the charm of the Ronnie Wood documentary, which chronicled a Mod-era British rockster who didn’t sell his soul, didn’t cut a single with Babyface, didn’t make an over-hyped concert movie for the Clinton Foundation, and figured out how to fry eggs on an open fire and wear neck scarves and three-piece suits and make something called barley wine without a stove that made it so interesting and real. You felt bad for the guy, but you felt great. Like Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Runner, he suddenly stopped at the finish line and stared at the establishment while the rich kids sprinted past him and won the race.
No. Ronnie Lane wrote beautiful songs and stayed true to himself. A mixture of rhythm & blues, American folk, Scottish and English traditional music, rock & roll and polka, his music was not arena-ready but it continues to have an earthy grit and an undying charm.
All in all, he was a soulful classic-rock songwriter up there with Steve Winwood, Ray Davies and Van Morrison. And he was my dad.
Just kidding there.
Joe Oesterle and Tim Cridland’s new travel guide Weird Las Vegas and Nevada documents the strange and wonderful side of The Silver State. In addition to sections on Bizarre Beasts and Local Legends, there’s a chapter on infamous Area 51 and, believe it or not, a mention of Operation EMU.
According to the book, which quotes Tom Dunkel’s feature story in The Baltimore Sun:
“Recently, author B. Brandon Barker wrote a satirical science fiction novel about a fake moon-landing project at the Nevada Test Site, entitled Operation EMU. To drum up publicity for the novel, he created a Web site that promotes its contents to be ‘true,’ and was surprised when someone posting to the site’s discussion board actually backed up some content as fact. John Nesbit, a former Air Force mechanic who was stationed at Nellis Air Base in the ’70s, wrote, “I do not know about Operation EMU, but it was a NASA training thing. That’s what we were told. Only later did it come out that it was much broader than that….’”
Seeing that this is a travel guide, my only regret is that there are no specific Nevada destinations Operation EMU enthusiasts can visit. The Stribling Valley and Shrouded Rock, where most of the novel’s action takes place, are tucked away deep inside Nellis Air Force Base if they even exist at all.
Actually, what am I saying? They don’t exist. I completely made them up. My suggestion, for the anyone who truly enjoyed the novel–or even read it–is to consider visiting Meteor Crater, Arizona, which was sort of the inspiration for the Stribling Valley, or The Integratron or Giant Rock, which were kind of the inspiration for Shrouded Rock, the high-tech command center where the NASA people monitor and direct the Experimental Mitigated Universe experiment that forms most of the book’s plot.
Republicans trying to justify the last eight years have reached a new level of desperation, comparing President George W. Bush to the comic-book hero of America’s No. 1 film.
No, I’m not talking about the “Space Chimp.”
In a new opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal, Southern California mystery writer Andrew Kavlan–author of ‘You’ll Never Have Lunch With a Terrorist In This Town Again’–claims that the new Batman film “The Dark Knight” is a love letter from a conservative Hollywood that is “forced to put on a mask” in order to speak what it knows to be the truth; namely that “doing what’s right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous.” Read the full post here.
While I’m still trying to figure out what it means, a blog called the Ypsi Tattler, which is lovably nonsensical and somehow associated with Eastern Michigan University–also known as EMU–posted a link to the Operation EMU site and displayed Craig LaRotonda’s brilliant book cover.
Mentions of the EMU novel are rare these days, so whatever it’s all about, we’ll take it. Also interesting that they mention bocce, a game popularized and perfected by the MeeMaw Indians in the early 16th century.
Not since Harry S. Truman sank a 21 foot jumper during a campaign stop in Keyser, West Virginia in 1948 have we seen a presidential candidate hit a genuine three-point shot. Ladies and gentlemen, our long wait is over.
As part of the “3-on-3 Challenge for Change” voter registration drive in Indiana, students who registered 20 people to vote were eligible for a drawing to play Sen. Barack Obama in a game of 3-on-3 at their school. Read the full post at Political Machine.
It appeared on a lonely street corner in Chicago: a stenciled silhouette of Barack Obama holding a microphone that connects to the United States. Immediately one wonders, What does it mean?
We can assume that this graffiti, somewhere on the streets of his hometown, is a gesture of support for Senator Obama. But it’s hard to deny the bleak effect it has on the viewer.
Obama stands on a street corner–one hand holding a microphone, the other hand pleading–while on the other side hovers the United States, streaked with dripping paint. The only link between the Senator and his country is a long, meandering wire that he seems one step away from tripping over. Read the full post here.
This just in from the crack team at EMU Headquarters. AboutFacts.net, a UFO conspiracy site, has written a really interesting and quite comprehensive article on astronauts that mentions astronauts talking about Operation EMU on the Apollo 16 mission. Feel that?
The article states… “So what did he mean? PLSS usually means Portable Life Support System in NASA terms. Was Duke talking about structures that were enclosed with life support systems or domes? EMUs could refer to a supposed secret Air Force operation named Operation EMU. Not much is known about this except that it was some sort of training experiment to prepare astronauts for deep space. It is said that during this operation, a Hollywood film crew that was under contract to NASA disappeared in Nevada.” Full article here.
Not since Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed four bottles of sarsaparilla passed by the 45th U.S. Congress in 1877 has a president (or presidential candidate) threatened a popular beverage’s natural course through the legislative process. But now, Senator John McCain has taken an intrepid stand against another beloved drink… here’s the full post.