South 12th

“The leading Obama cheerleader among the commentariat is Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, whose ‘erection of the heart’ for the candidate has no match,” writes Slate’s Jack Shafer.

I couldn’t believe I’d read this phrase; I recognized it instantly. As Shafer points out in a footnote, the phrase was coined by critic Lester Bangs to describe his reaction to seeing Elvis Presley perform in concert; no other performer, he elaborates, had ever prompted such desire and self-identification and envy in him. As a teenage Lester Bangs disciple, I had virtually memorized passage-for-passage the text of Psychotic Reaction and Carburetor Dung, the Greil Marcus-edited anthology of Bangs’ work in which that phrase appears.

In fact, when my college band, the Blowup in Japanese, needed a title for our lone EP, my friend Dave Wolkensperg, our guitarist, insisted we call it Erection of the Heart. It’s out there on some bit torrents, I’m pretty certain.

Excellent hour-long radio documentary about the 1968 campaign between Humphrey, Nixon and Wallace.

I’ve always found McCarthy to be the most inspiring figure here; RFK was certainly a great man, but it was Gene that challenged the Johnson administration’s prosecution of the Vietnam War initially, essentially ending LBJ’s presidency and making it safe for other anti-war Democrats to join the race. Rod Serling’s radio commercial for McCarthy about ten minutes in is wonderful.

And thank god that forty years later, the right-wing ascendancy that started with Nixon and chronicled in this program is finally in retreat. Listen to Wallace’s rhetoric in the final third, all that business about how “they’ve looked down their nose at you and me a long time, they’ve called us rednecks.” Listen to that and tell me John Lewis was wrong about Palin.

MNSpeak editor Max Sparber has recently been posting to his blog archival film reviews he’d written during the go-go ’90s, presumably for either City Pages here in MSP, or for CP’s counterpart in Omaha (if I have my Sparber bio straight). It’s been interesting to watch for a few different reasons; primarily as a reminder that the pop cultural canon, such as it is, doesn’t always unfold in the way we remember it unfolding.

Case in point: in the curious review posted above, Sparber reluctantly admits to enjoying prop comedian Carrot Top’s Chairman of the Board, ending the review thusly: “What genius decided to crank up the whole thing with a series of eye-popping tiki-themed set pieces, a cast of journeyman Hollywood professionals…and overload it with so many jokes at such a frantic pace that it simply doesn’t matter that it’s a Carrot Top movie? I’d like to meet that man, shake his hand and congratulate him, but I missed his name during the credits. I was too busy trying to catch my breath and control my furious blushing…”

Well, thanks to the Internet, we know now what the young Sparber could not. A trip to IMDb reveals that the man who deserves the credit here is director/writer Alex Zamm. It would be inspiring to say that history has vindicated Zamm, and that he has gone on to make a remarkable career for himself. Unfortunately, except for a few episodes of the much-beloved Comedy Central show Upright Citizens Brigade, Zamm has primarily focused on straight-to-video kiddie movies. Oh well.