French cyclist Laurent Fignon died today of cancer.
I remember watching Fignon in his battle with Greg LeMond at the 1989 Tour de France. Fignon lost that battle by only eight seconds. I didn’t know he was fighting cancer; it’s a shock to hear that he died.
Tomorrow, I’m going to see Rush for the fourth time.
Signals: the Rush album I've loved the longest
It’s surprising that I haven’t seen them live more often, since I’ve been a fierce fan since way back in the early 80s when a redheaded kid named Sean introduced me to their Signals album in elementary school music class. I don’t remember which song finally hooked me into Rush — was it Subdivisions? Might have been. I remember one of my friends that year was obsessed with one-hit wonder Toni Basil, and went around singing:
Oh Mickey, you’re so fine
You’re so fine you blow my mind
Hey Mickey, hey Mickey.
In that context it’s less surprising that my elementary-school self would appreciate a song like Subdivisions which tended to be a bit more… sociological:
Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown
Anyway, I remember the music class. We were supposed to try to play some popular music, in some kind of effort to make music education a little more personal for the students, or something. Well, we get split up into pairs, each group of two with a xylophone, and my partner Sean suggests that we learn to play Subdivisions on the xylophone.
Subdivisions would sound fine on the xylophone. Oh, yes. Sean, you were one ballsy motherf*%cker.
Signals will always be my favorite summer album, perhaps because I played it so much that first summer when I stumbled into Rush, or because of the reggae vibe on so many of those songs, or because of the summertime lyrics on songs like Analog Kid:
A hot and windy August afternoon
Has the trees in constant motion
With a flash of silver leaves
As they’re rocking in the breeze
The boy lies in the grass with one blade
Stuck between his teeth
A vague sensation quickens
In his young and restless heart
And a bright and nameless vision
Has him longing to depart
So many of the reasons that I’ve become a lifelong Rush fan, and a fan of almost all their work, is because I started off, as a kid, with Signals.
Think about what I had to do after I’d fallen in love with Signals. I had to listen to more Rush, of course, and that meant checking out their previous albums. So I immediately started listening to the album that came out just before Signals. This was Moving Pictures, which was, and is, Rush’s most popular album. It’s is an album that caps off most of what I think of as “early” Rush — the epic-rock Rush, the Rush of Fly By Night and 2112. That Rush was a lot of guitar and headbanging drums and screaming vocals, which on Moving Pictures was refined into classic hits that every rock fan knows even if they don’t know Rush at all — Tom Sawyer, Limelight, Freewill. As a kid, once I’d digested Moving Pictures, it was a short leap to digesting Permanent Waves and Hemispheres and Caress of Steel. So I did, and I became a fan of all of that stuff.
Meanwhile, as I was learning about the older music, Rush was releasing their first post-Signals album, the dystopian but oh-so-awesome Grace Under Pressure. They were changing their s0und, using more keyboards, getting the reputation of being a “prog-rock” band. Many of the older fans that had already spent years listening to 2112, or that had been hooked by Tom Sawyer, weren’t really thrilled by what Rush was doing in the mid- to late-80s with Grace Under Pressure and Power Windows. Songs like Mystic Rhythms were being played as background music on episodes of ABC’s news show 20/20, and that just wasn’t very head-bangy rock and roll.
But for me, as a kid entranced with Signals and carrying none of the baggage that old Caress of Steel fans probably had, I didn’t care. All I cared about was how cool Alex Lifeson was in the VHS video of one of their Grace Under Pressure shows. He had the Miami Vice look down cold. I liked Duran Duran too, of course, but who could touch Rush? And if those guys were playing stuff like Middletown Dreams, I was not going to object. It would be incoherent for any fan of Subdivisions to object to the Power Windows album when it has Middletown Dreams:
The middle-aged madonna
Calls her neighbour on the phone
Day by day the seasons pass
And leave her life alone
But she’ll go walking out that door
On some bright afternoon
To go and paint big cities
From a lonely attic room
For me, then, Rush was always both hard rock and prog rock. They couldn’t ever disappoint me when they made an album like Presto, which came out during my first year of college and managed to rope in a whole new generation of fans that hadn’t ever been real fond of Tom Sawyer. And unlike those fans who might be lost by the band’s current turn back to hard rock, I can say that songs like Earthshine are as good as any they’ve ever done.
My youthful choice of Rush fandom has turned out pretty good for me. I’m glad they keep recording and touring. And now I can browse YouTube for hours and hours of concert bootlegs (of varying quality) from the past thirty years.
For example, this is a mellower song from an energetic show in Albany in 1991:
And from when the current tour stopped in Chicago on July 5th:
One of the many crashes in Stage 1 of the Tour de France was caused by a dog running out into the middle of the peloton.
I want to know what happened to that pup. I’ve read that he “survived” but I want to know how he is. Where is the press on this story?
Congratulations to the University of Chicago Emergency Medicine Residency Class of 2010!
And for the Class of 2011, only one more year left. It’ll go quickly, so enjoy yourselves.
Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, is already halfway through Barry Eisler’s new novel, Inside Out. I’m looking forward to his review.
The real reason for this post, however, is to boast — I’ve already finished Inside Out. I thought it was excellent.
I’m feeling nostalgic today. So I’m going to post a lengthy quote from Ted V. McAllister over at Front Porch Republic, because it points out something obvious that many of us don’t think about very often:
The tendency to think in terms of generations, of generational experiences that define an age cohort, is a product of speed. During ages when change is glacial and when technology remains almost constant for decades or centuries, when social and economic conditions alter at a pace that requires historical analysis to detect—during such ages the experiences of life are amazingly consistent across generations. A man might very well assume that his father, his grandfather, and his grandson all participate in the same culture, the same economy, the same religious beliefs, the same constellation of experiences that shaped his identity. People separated by perhaps two hundred years share the same “relevant” knowledge or beliefs. They all belong, as it were, to the same civilizational generation. In some sense one might claim that these people are bound by historical memory and have no reason for nostalgia.
Much of the human story, however, includes people who live through very rapid change and who experience themselves occupying a distinct time or age. They understand that something significant enough has changed as to produce a before and after experience, leaving them aware that there is no going back. For a man born in the United States in 1920, for instance, his lifetime seems full of such transformations. A great depression, a world war, and a subsequent economic transformation (to say nothing of the attending changes in society, politics, and religion) certainly set his generation apart from his parents and his children. Things had changed dramatically and rapidly, and the austerity of his teenage years followed by the nationalistic regimentation of his twenties, gave his life, his beliefs, his fears and expectations, a shape that fit no previous or later American generation. He knew that he and his generation were different.
USA 1-0 Algeria (Highlights)
Simão | MySpace Video
Here’s the highlight reel.
Multiple years of military futility, with ever-mounting casualties and no evidence of any progress, are insufficient reasons for Obama to change anything substantive about his Afghanistan policy, which amounts to: keep spending money we don’t have, keep sending troops into harm’s way when they aren’t actually making anything any better, and keep telling us that this is all critical for the defense of the United States.
So I’d be shocked if a Rolling Stone article which revealed Stanley McChrystal’s scorn for Richard Holbrooke, and which caused Obama to replace McChrystal with our all-purpose imperial general-of-excellence David Petraeus, will lead to any substantive changes in Afghanistan policy.
Robert Wone (photo by Mel Barnhart)
And perhaps more interestingly, can a cardiac surgeon who answers “only about five or ten seconds” really know this?
Update: A reader has corrected me — this is a bench trial with no jury. So where you see “juror” please read “the judge.” Thanks for the correction. I now wonder whether the judge will find this expert testimony helpful.
Jurors are being asked to consider these questions in a D.C. Superior Court trial charging three men with conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the murder of Robert Wone, an attorney who was stabbed in the chest while spending the night with friends. According to the defendants’ theory of the case, Wone was killed when an unidentified intruder entered the house on the ground floor, went up the stairs and into Wone’s room on the second floor, stabbed him in the chest several times, and fled, without anyone seeing him (or her). Prosecutors say that the three defendants know who killed Wone, and that they tampered with the crime scene to impede the investigation.
One argument that the prosecution is making is that Wone took a long time to die, such that he might have lived had his friends called 911 earlier. No, says the defense; Wone was pretty much dead within seconds after being stabbed, so there was nothing more the defendants could have done to save his life. Hence, the question for the jury: how long does a stab wound like Wone’s take to kill you? Does a cardiac surgeon know the answer? Does a pathologist? Oh, the headaches that come with being a juror.
Both sides are presenting so-called “experts” (mostly physicians) who offer conflicting testimony about how long it takes to die from a Robert Wone-type stab wound to the chest. But do any of these doctors really know?
Much of what physicians do, we do without much actual evidence of its efficacy. We do it because we were told to do it in residency, or because we think it makes sense. That’s not always a bad thing. The point is that physicians frequently have to act without the certainty they’d prefer. This is true for many of the daily questions which doctors face every day in their practice — whether a drug will work, whether a procedure will help, etc. There’s a lot of uncertainty.
There’s even more uncertainty about the questions attorneys are asking these physician “expert” witnesses to answer in this trial. Question: given these autopsy reports, do you think the deceased would have survived for five to ten minutes after the wound, or do you think he would have died within seconds? The doctors can give their opinions, but I wouldn’t pretend that they have any firm knowledge one way or the other. Trauma, in particular, is a tricky thing to understand. No two traumatic wounds are the same, few of them are actually studied prospectively and systematically, and patients often defy common expectations about the course of their injuries. So there’s no way that any physician is going to know with certainty how long Robert Wone survived after he was stabbed.
This doesn’t mean that their opinions would be useless to a jury in a criminal case. The jurors are asked to listen to the entirety of the prosecution’s argument, and to the entirety of the defense argument, and then decide: has the prosecution proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants are guilty of the crime they’ve been charged with? They may decide to convict even if they dismiss the physician testimony as a bunch of useless verbiage.
I remember my only experience of being a juror. We were asked to consider whether the defendant was guilty of driving drunk. The prosecution and the defense called up a bunch of expert witnesses to testify about nystagmus, the metabolism of alcohol, and whatnot, but for me all of that testimony was useless. Neither side’s expert witnesses were credible. But I had no difficulty voting for conviction, because the rest of the prosecutor’s case established beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was guilty. The other jurors seemed to think the same way — we spent a lot of time in the jury room savaging the expert witnesses for both sides. We all thought the defendant was guilty based on the other evidence and testimony.
We’ll see what happens in the Wone trial, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of jurors in that case end up feeling pretty much the same way about the expert testimony.
