by Dan Sweeney
Along with the overly earnest telethon in which stars took breaks from their Gatsby-esque lives to raise some $50 million, the Wyclef Jean-led Yele foundation (which has recently had a hard time explaining why it paid six-figure sums for “outreach programs”) and all the other national projects and charity groups that raised money for the constantly disaster-struck island nation of Haiti, a host of local artists got in on the act. The results, while perhaps not as meaningful in purely quantitative, dollar-sign terms, were no less heartfelt, and perhaps more so, than Clooney and DiCaprio playing Sobbing for Dollars. The whole telethon experience reminded me of nothing so much as Matt Damon playing himself in Entourage, pissing all over Vincent Chase’s half-assed attempts to help the kids.
But it’s impossible to get that faux-teary vibe from a concert like the one that took place last week at Propaganda in the far north of Lake Worth. I hadn’t been up to the still relatively new club run by longtime local music impresario Steve Rullman, and that sin of omission provided yet another reason to drive all the way up to Lake Worth on a Monday night. There was also the altruistic reason, of course, with all the door money, plus 10 percent of bar sales, going to Doctors Without Borders, about as good of an international aid organization as there is. (The International Red Cross, by contrast, has yet to spend about half a billion dollars earmarked for the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The lesson being that donating to such organizations is good, but donating to them for specific disaster sites is probably bad, or at least unhelpful.) A third reason to hit Propaganda was the fact that Surfer Blood, the Next Big Thing in the indie-rock world, was headlining, and it’d be exciting to see the band while I still had a chance, so that I could say I saw them when.
Kill Now?! and Sweet Bronco were the first two acts. The trio of Sweet Bronco provided a perfect counterpoint to the brash, loud, straight-ahead punk-rock of Kill Now?! The post-punk-influenced Sweet Bronco included a Stereolab cover and vocals from Chris Horgan that occasionally veered onto trails blazed by Ian Curtis. John Ralston followed Sweet Bronco, along with a seven-member backing band that included a drummer, a keyboardist, a guitarist, a bassist, a pedal-steel player, a xylophonist/tambourine player and a fiddler. The resulting sound was a wild blend of jangly rock, country and soul-saving, wailing vocals from Ralston who, with his longish mane and newly trimmed beard, looked like a latter-day Jesus.
Surfer Blood, unfortunately for them, had to follow Ralston. The band suffered greatly in comparison, coming across as a simple, by-the-numbers indie-rock act. But, hey, they are young and cute, and all the girls love ‘em. That’s enough these days, at least for a little while.
Incidentally, the local Haiti benefit concerts continue: This Saturday, check out a long list of local performers, including Garden’s Edge, Rajesh Ramoutar and Togen, from 3 to 8 p.m. at Stage 84, 91128 State Road 84, in Davie. The $5 admission goes to the Red Cross. Visit Stage84fl.com.
VIKINGS BE PRAISED!
Winning a sports bet is always a little joy, and not just for the money in your pocket, but also for the smug sense of superiority. Your judgment of the teams proved better than the other guy’s, and you can now taunt him for months to come, especially this late in the season. The big winners of the next few weeks will have the entire off-season to berate their friends, co-workers, fellow sports enthusiasts and other assorted degenerate gamblers who, in kinder terms, are known as the sporting crowd. I count myself among them, for better or worse, usually the latter, and I can say without any doubt that, of all the wins one may experience, winning on points has got to be the sweetest.
There’s a sort of bent joy that comes in, say, rooting for the Vikings to win the NFC Championship, cheering for them all game, and then shouting with joy when they lose by three. The betting line for this past Sunday’s Vikings-Saints game was four, and so, as Favre threw across the field for an interception rather than run a few yards and set up a field goal in the final seconds of the game, I popped the cork on a champagne bottle and counted my many blessings. Sure, I had just broken even, having acceded (against my better judgement) to the insane ramblings of a pair of friends from New York and bet on the Jets in the previous game, but none of that mattered anymore.
As the NFC Championship headed into overtime, the only thing that could kill me would have been a touchdown by the Saints. So as the ball flew straight through the uprights, I poured myself that glass of champagne as every other person in the packed living room in which I watched the game who had the bad luck to be a Minnesota fan sobbed and gnashed their teeth and prayed to God or Jesus or John Ralston, “Why, Oh Lord, why have you forsaken us?”
Their cries, and the taunts of the vicious New Orleans faithful in the room, all fell on deaf ears. Favre had lost his comeback story by three points, but I had won by one.
MASS. HYSTERIA
With the victory in the Massachusetts Senate campaign of Republican Scott Brown, Democrats have, predictably, fallen to pieces. I say predictably because the Democrats fall to pieces in a light wind, and so a Republican taking Teddy K.’s seat in the U.S. Senate would certainly have a worse effect. Everybody’s blaming somebody now, especially for the health-care bill that will now, in all likelihood, never pass through Congress. And, sure, there’s plenty of blame to go around, but some politicians are pointing fingers in absurd directions. Take our own Sen. Bill Nelson, who said Monday of President Obama and health care: “I think he’s allowed the left wing to pull him too much in that direction.”
Really, Bill? Really? The left, which wanted a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system but settled for a public option, and then an opt-out public option, and then an opt-in public option, and then the expansion of Medicare to people age 55 and older, and, in the end, got nothing at all? That left?
Of course, Sen. Nelson’s own view on health care was inscrutable until the end of the debate. He waited until the Senate Finance Committee offered up its bland, do-nothing plan, refusing to support or not support a public option, until his support would mean nothing. But that’s always been the man’s fence-sitting, mealy-mouthed style. I get that. He’s a politician in the truest sense of the word. He has no ideology or belief system, just a set of talking points backed by poll numbers. But the shame of this most recent quote is that he learned the opposite lesson that all this Massachusetts hoopla should have taught him — that if Democrats would actually stand for something, instead of giving in at every turn, they would hold onto their support.
Fully 18 percent of Massachusetts voters who went for Obama in 2008 voted for Brown in 2010. Of them, more than 80 percent support a public option.
If the Democrats had listened to the liberals among them, instead of kowtowing to greedheaded zombies such as Bill’s colleague from Nebraska, Ben Nelson (no relation), and passed a strong public option through both the House and the Senate before the vote in Massachusetts, we’d all have health care, and Coakley would have won by five or six points.
Unfortunately, the lesson that spineless, poll-driven weasels such as Bill Nelson learned from all this is that they need to be even more spineless and poll-driven. At this rate, after the elections in November 2010, the Democrats will be like an appendix on the body politic, a useless flapping sack of skin that occasionally becomes inflamed. Ah well, at least they’ll have better hair than your typical appendix. That’s something.
Send donations for Haiti to Doctors Without Borders and other worthy charities. Send Super Bowl predictions to Dan Sweeney at dfsweeney@citylinkmagazine.com. For more of Sweeney’s stuff, visit Huffingtonpost.com.
