Movie Review: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007). Peter Bogdanovich.

Among the most prized DVD sets in my musical film collection is Peter Bogdanovich's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream, a 4-disc set that includes a documentary spanning 2 of the discs, plus a full-length concert video DVD of a special live performance the band played in Gainesville, Florida, their original hometown, to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the band's formation, and a CD containing rare and unreleased songs.

Most of my friends and family know that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers has been one of my all-time favorite rock bands since the 1980s. I "discovered" them a little late -- by the time I first listened to their music in the late '80s, they had already been making great records and building a huge following for more than ten years. But since then, I have followed them avidly, right through the release of the band's last studio album, Hypnotic Eye, in 2014, and Petty's sad death at the end of his "final" tour in 2017.

There are documentaries about many pop music bands and musical artists, which typically follow a similar format. Interviews (where possible) with the principals are interspersed with interviews with collaborators, mentors, fans, friends and family, along with snippets of live performances, and maybe some footage from studio recording sessions as well.

Bogdanovich's massive compilation follows this same formula, but it stands out as one of the best and most exhaustive such efforts I've seen. Much of its success, which included a limited theatrical release, can be attributed to the fact that Bogdanovich is a major filmmaker and creative artist in his own right, who brought his talent, resources and vast experience to the project. It was also clearly a labor of love -- there's not much doubt that Bogdanovich was also a huge fan of Petty and the remarkable group of close friends and musical collaborators that surrounded him.

The documentary takes us back to the beginning. It covers Petty's family life as a child, including his loving and supportive mother, and his rocky relationship with his father, his discovery of rock music as a young teenager, and how the band members found each other. In telling this story, we hear interviews with Petty, and all the other band members, along with family members, friends and other musicians.

From this point on, we get a very detailed and complete history of every stage of the band's history, from their Gainesville years, the move to Los Angeles, their first recordings and record contracts, live performances, tours, personnel changes, and ups and downs, through the end of the documentary period in 2007. And the interviews keep bringing in surprising new friends and admirers to the tale, including Stevie Nicks, Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, George Harrison, Roger McGuinn, Jackson Browne, and many other celebrities and music industry luminaries whose lives crossed paths with Petty and the band, and were deeply affected by it.

I'm sure this documentary is too long and detailed to be of general interest to everyone, but for the many fans and enthusiasts who have followed and loved the music of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, this is the definitive visual and musical account of their amazing career as one of the best and longest-enduring rock and roll acts of all time. I haven't checked, but it may be available to borrow through local libraries, and of course it can also be bought online. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Wild Tales: A Rock and Roll Life (2013). Graham Nash.

I saw an article this morning in The Seattle Times about an upcoming small venue local solo concert by Graham Nash, now 80 years old, who (for those who haven’t heard of him) is a famous surviving member of two of the great bands of the 1960s and 1970s, and a two-time inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Since it’s once again Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache, I thought I’d take the opportunity to review his 2013 autobiography, which I read recently.

I’ll jump ahead in the story, to provide some context for those readers who don’t know: Nash first gained fame in the mid-1960s as a singer, guitarist, songwriter and founder of the Hollies, one of the more popular “British Invasion” bands, whose songs regularly soared to the top of the international charts, along with those of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.  A sample of their greatest hits would include songs like "Bus Stop", "Carrie-Anne", "Look Through Any Window", and "On a Carousel".

Nash was particularly well known for his signature high harmonies and vocal leads in many of the Hollies’ hits. But after years of rock stardom, he tired of the band’s formulaic sound and songwriting, so he moved to southern California, where in the late 1960s, he became a founding member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY).

In Wild Tales, Nash takes us all the way back to his childhood, growing up in a slum neighborhood in Manchester, England. He talks about how he found his way to music, and the influences from late 1950s American rock, and the popular artists in England at the time that led to his love of harmony singing. He describes the formation of the Hollies, and sets it in the context of the other bands in England at the time that were vying for popularity and opportunities to perform. He also relates his family life and formative experiences, and how he came to his lifelong passion for photography, which has led him to acclaim for his visual art in addition to his storied musical career.

Nash doesn’t hold back in describing the people, places and events he experienced as a member of the Hollies, and then later in CSNY. His memories of the CSNY era are particularly salacious and gossipy. This legendary “super-group” of four established rock stars from other famous bands, with their unique complex vocal harmonies, massively popular rock hits and anthems of the Boomer generation, along with their drug use, sexual exploits, and larger than life friendships with other rockers and celebrities, has always been renowned for the instability of its internal relationships within the band, driven by gigantic egos, sudden wealth and their increasingly erratic personal behaviors as their celebrity and musical fame skyrocketed.

Nash takes us along for the full ride, not only at the moments of their greatest success, but also through their later years of repeated band reunions, break-ups, tragedies, new projects and awards. He shares details and stories about his various personal relationships with women, including groupies, his wives, and his famous but brief romance with Joni Mitchell in the late 1960s in Laurel Canyon, which he immortalized both in songs and in his photography. He also opens up about the ups and downs of his friendships, including with several of his Hollies band-mates, and with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, and others from the pantheon of classic rock superstars.

This is definitely a “tell all” book, which should appeal to fans and historians of the age of rock and roll, as told by one of the most successful and long-lasting musical and artistic voices of the era. It’s not the most beautifully written autobiography I’ve read, but it is honest, authentic and enlightening. Recommended.

Book Review: Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy (2021). Tom Nichols.

As you’ll recall, just last week, I did an “Honorable Mentions” post on five books about authoritarianism, democracy and recent politics. Coincidentally, though, this week I read another such book, but one with a very different outlook than most of the other ones.

Our Own Worst Enemy, written by a professor at the Naval War College, who is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic and other periodicals, turns the focus mostly away from the bad actors and would-be authoritarians whose attempts to undermine democracy here and abroad have held so much of our attention over the past several years. Instead, he argues that “we the people” need to take a hard look at ourselves and our discontents to understand why our politics have reached such a sorry state.

Nichols makes a number of interesting points that have the ring of truth about them. He begins with a well-supported assertion that we are living in a time of material abundance and technological accomplishment beyond anything humans have ever known before, where even the poor take for granted wealth and technology undreamed of by humans in the past. Despite that reality, many of us are obsessively unhappy, and focus mainly on what we perceive as constant losses and social decline (much of which is non-existent) rather than the relatively bountiful conditions all around us. This reflexive dissatisfaction, and the fear of loss, are powerful emotions, and ones easily manipulated by cynical political actors.

The author talks about the growing epidemic of narcissism, now amplified by social media, where more and more of us are focused mainly on ourselves, our own desires, and our appearance to the rest of the world. He contrasts the selfishness of the narcissistic personality with the kind of outward-looking, modest, generous and compassionate personality which is at the core of democratic behavior, and a democratic society. A successful democracy requires that we regularly show compassion and tolerance for others, including strangers, but he suggests that more of us now have little use for or concern for anyone outside of ourselves and our immediate family.

Another observation he makes has to do with boredom. He suggests that our democracy may be a victim of its own success, in creating such freedom and abundant wealth, combined with the endless passive entertainment we consume, that many of us don’t know what to do to find meaning and fulfillment. This is another void in ourselves which is ripe for manipulation by con men and hucksters (on both ends of the political spectrum), who know how to whip up enthusiasm and excitement in a bored population by appealing to imaginary threats and fears.

Several writers have recently noted the apparent vibrancy of Ukrainian democracy under threat from the Russian invasion, as compared with our angry and polarized society. The difference seems to lie in the fact that for Ukraine, the whole society is now united by the excitement, the shared threats and privations, and the clear and present danger posed to their freedom and lives by Putin’s invasion. We don’t share any such feelings of common destiny or meaning in the face of an unambiguous threat (a feeling probably last experienced here in World War II), particularly since we rely on a paid volunteer military populated by only a few of us for our common defense.  Instead we divide into factions and tribes, and allow our discontents to be nurtured by those groups and individuals, from politics to finance to media, who can profit from our antipathies toward each other.

Nichols also spends some time on the extent to which many citizens of the United States are too uninformed about policy and political issues to be able to make reasoned, rationally consistent judgments when it comes time to vote. As a case study, he looks at the significant group of voters who voted for Barack Obama twice, then voted for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. A comparison of the programs of the two candidates, and their respective parties, reveals little overlap in the ideologies and programs advanced by the two parties or the candidates. Yet this group of voters willingly moved their support from one side to the other apparently based on celebrity, “excitement” factors and emotional “feelings”, and the public images of the two candidates, rather than the sorts of policies they embraced, and would attempt to enact if elected.

One other item considered by the author is the growth and active promotion of “resentment” in politics, where increasingly people will act against their own interests in order to make sure that someone else doesn’t get something, and who perceive loss and humiliation in every event that benefits anyone else. Much of this he lays at the feet of social media and our entertainment industry, which stokes our own envy continuously by feeding us idealized images of other people apparently having things we might not have. 

The author himself worries through all this that he is engaged in “moral hectoring”, and perhaps he is, but nevertheless, in his call for us to look deeply at ourselves as well as others in trying to understand and hopefully ease the woes of our contemporary polarized democracy, he is making a vital appeal. It's one we should listen to and reflect upon. Recommended.

TV Reviews: Never Have I Ever, Seasons 1-3, Netflix, and The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022), Amazon Studios.

You may have noticed that it's been a little slow the last week here at The Memory Cache blog. There's a reason for that (well, several reasons), but the main one is that I've been putting most of my creative time and energy into my music lately. That happens sometimes! There are only so many hours in the day, have you noticed?  The good news though is that I will be releasing several new singles (with videos) in the very near future. I'll have more news about that soon.

In the meantime, today I thought I'd do short reviews of two lightweight but entertaining series with similar themes and scenarios, one each from Netflix and Amazon Studios.

Netflix's offering, Never Have I Ever, is now in its third season. The story is centered on a brilliant but socially insecure teenage girl, Devi Vishwakumar (played charmingly by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). 

Devi is the daughter of a successful East Indian immigrant family in California. She is trying to figure out high school, romance and sex, and how to be popular and socially successful in a typical American school, while surrounded at home with all the influences, expectations and strict rules for girls of her family's traditional Indian culture. 

But that's not quite all of it. At the same time she's dealing with all her own teenage insecurities, family problems, new desires and her drive to succeed in school and with her friends, she's also trying to navigate the psychological devastation of her father's unexpected recent death, and the void it's left in her life, as well as that of her physician mother.  

With all that apparent heaviness, it might seem that this show might be depressing or serious, but in fact, it's anything but that. This is definitely intended as a situational comedy. It depicts the real and common teenage adjustment problems of bright girls from immigrant families in their teenage years, but with a soft touch, and plenty of amusing humor and sensitivity.  The episodes are only a half hour each, so it's easy light entertainment. Recommended.

Amazon's series The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022), tells the story of Belly (real name Isabella Chung, played by Lola Tung), an Asian-American girl who returns at age 15 (going on 16) with her mother and older brother to the lovely summer home of a wealthy white family with whom they have been sharing summer vacations since Belly's early childhood. 

The backstory on this "melded family" is that the two mothers have been best friends since college, and both are now having marital issues with their respective husbands. More important to Belly, though, is that for the first time, she is seeing her two "older brothers" in the other family with a romantic eye, at the same time they are noticing her as a blossoming young woman instead of just a sort of fondly regarded kid sister or cousin.  

This sets up a love triangle situation (fairly innocent in terms of any actual behavior other than kissing) which somewhat taxed my credulity, since most kids I have known who grew up in these kinds of close family/friend situations tend to look elsewhere for romance. But still, I'll concede it's not impossible.

Along with the main romantic story line of Belly and the two brothers in the other family, there are a number of other family and young adult challenges, including how the children deal with their parents' breakups, the differences in outlook between the middle class Asian family and their rich friends (and their community), an adult extra-marital affair or two in the mix, Belly's involvement in an upper class social "coming out" process at the behest of her mother's friend, and the threat of a potentially fatal disease to one of the parents, with its emotional impacts on the family members.  In other words, there is plenty of grist for the drama mill.

This 7-part series, which apparently has been renewed for a second season, is more earnest and less comedic than Never Have I Ever, but still tells a watchable story of families and their teenagers' early strivings and romantic longings, in the context of friendships that cross both class and racial lines in modern America. It's not serious drama, but it is a reasonable entertainment if you enjoy watching family stories aimed at young adult audiences and situations. Recommended.

Honorable Mentions: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and American Politics.

Today I'm doing another of my "honorable mentions" posts, featuring another five good books I've read that focus on similar or related topics. Today's list includes a sampling of the best of the political science and history books related to the threats to democracy posed by autocratic authoritarian movements, including that of the Republican Party under Donald Trump.

 

Book Review: How Democracy Dies (2018). Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt.

An excellent political science book analyzing how democracy is being and has been eroded toward autocracy, comparing various scenarios and steps in other countries to what was going on during the Trump era.

This was an early warning that democracy has guardrails, in the form of legal and institutional checks and balances, and norms, and that these were heavily under assault in Trump era America. This theme is certainly far less surprising now than it was when written, but nevertheless it’s an excellent political science exploration of the ways in which democracy can be undermined and ultimately destroyed. Recommended. 

 

Book Review: The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017). Edward Luce.

Luce provides an eloquent description of the macro-level global economic trends now shaping the world, to the advantage of rising Eastern countries and economies (especially China) and the increasing disadvantage of the West.

He provides a high-level view of why populism, nationalism, protectionism and autocracy are on the rise here and in Europe, as the middle class thins out, fast-growing economies abroad and automation at home threaten jobs and living standards, the gap between rich and poor expands, and a frightened working population in the West is turning to authoritarian solutions over traditional liberal democracy. Recommended.



Book Review: Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Anne Applebaum.   

Applebaum is an excellent writer for The Atlantic, who is also an historian and subject matter expert on Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet world and authoritarianism. In this account, she draws in part on her own experiences living and traveling in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe over the past two decades to provide illustrative cases of democracies sliding into illiberal democracy and then authoritarianism.

She uses the case of Poland’s transformation under the Law and Justice Party as her point of departure, then also discusses other recent illiberal democracies and anti-democratic movements, in Poland, Spain and Turkey, as well as Brexit in the UK and the rise of Donald Trump, with his authoritarian Republican brand of politics in the USA.

Applebaum has an interesting background from which to make this critique. Her ideological preferences and associations as a writer and person (as she shares in the book) are definitely on the right end of the political spectrum, but these tendencies don’t appear to act as ideological blinders. As a historian, she is clear-eyed and even-handed in seeing the tendency toward authoritarianism within individuals and societies as being equal opportunity: it can and does arise regardless of the ideological background of the leader and his followers.

A very good account of the recent rise in authoritarian movements, and the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of democracy around the world. Recommended.  

 

Book Review:  A Warning (2019). Anonymous: A Senior Trump White House Official.

The same unknown person (now identified as Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor) who wrote an editorial in The New York Times in 2018 claiming a bunch of good people inside the administration were protecting us from Donald Trump has now written a book in which he tells us what it's like to live inside the insane Trump bubble.

And oh, by the way -- those reassurances in the editorial? It turns out they were wrong (big surprise). The author now believes that no one can keep Trump from trying to do what he wants to do, which is to destroy American democracy and become an autocrat. It is an interesting and by now completely normalized view, but nothing we don't already know.

There are many other insider accounts of the Trump administration and his pathological behavior by now, most of which I’m probably not going to read. There will be even more written. I’m afraid they’ll be writing books, plays and movies about Trump and his bizarre administration far into the future. But this book is a reasonably good representative of the contemporary genre, if you’ve never read one before. Recommended. 

 

Book Review:  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia * Europe * America (2018). Timothy Snyder.

Timothy Snyder, the noted Yale University history professor and a leading expert on modern European history, wrote one of the earliest and most excellent guidebooks to surviving the Trump presidency and preserving democracy. Little more than a pamphlet in size, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017) broke down the experiences of Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism into twenty easily digestible rules and principles of how autocracy develops, and what the signs of its onset are.

In The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder provides a detailed history of recent developments in autocracy, and threats it poses to democracy around the world, focused primarily on the disappointing collapse of democratic efforts in Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union, and the ominous career of Vladimir Putin as Russia's leader.

He uses Putin’s rise as the most important contemporary instance of modern autocracy, especially in Putin’s creation of what Snyder calls “the eternal present” – an information environment where the past is rewritten to support the leader’s preferred beliefs and interests, the present is made unknowable by the careful propagation of conflicting and contradictory narratives and conspiracy theories, and belief in a different future is impossible because of the lack of any mechanism for succession of political control beyond the life of the current leader.

A portion of this book, which was written before the beginning of the Ukraine war in February, also covers elements of Putin’s ongoing plans and attempts to gain and consolidate control over Ukraine during the past decade. It provides valuable insights into why Russia invaded Ukraine, and also some history to explain why Ukraine’s resistance has been so spirited. Recommended.

Book Review: Sea of Tranquility (2022). Emily St. John Mandel.

This is an earnest first attempt at a real science-fiction novel by the author of Station Eleven, which follows a number of ordinary human characters in different earth eras, from the early 20th century to an imagined future a few centuries ahead, where there are human colonies on the moon, and in deep space too.

In addition to those sci-fi story creations and plot premises, she also includes a time travel element, and plays with the contemporary fascination with the possibility of reality being nothing more than an advanced computer simulation. In this book, she imagines a world where that may in fact be the case, but also poses the question of whether that actually matters to the people experiencing that reality.

There’s also a global pandemic in the story, and an author separated from her family, on a book tour at its onset, who may or may not die as a result of the disease. Remember that this story is coming from a popular real author, who had previously written a real novel about a global pandemic (Station Eleven), then had to keep functioning as a professional writer and mother during an actual pandemic. There’s something so familiar sounding about that scenario! A little projection onto her fictional character, perhaps?

As with her other books, Mandel’s strength is in creating believable characters with whom we can empathize, and believable dialogue in unusual or unfamiliar situations. Even though the story suggests themes of the COVID-19 era of the past two years, and our collective experience of it, it is still an entertaining and engaging tale. Recommended.

TV Series Reviews: Dune (2000) & Children of Dune (2003). SyFy Channel (On Blu-ray DVD).

These were two 3-part SyFy Channel TV mini-series versions of Frank Herbert’s Dune stories, made in the early 2000s. They are available on Amazon in a Blu-ray DVD format, so you may have to buy them to watch these shows. I’ve had little luck finding them on any streaming sites, although they may reappear from time to time.

I saw them when the two mini-series first came out, and decided to see them again recently, since I had remembered they were good, and I had been re-reading the books. I thought after watching them again that they held up well to repeat viewing, even all these years later.

Since the first publication of Dune (as a book) in the 1960s, there have been repeated efforts by various Hollywood producers and studios to turn it into a blockbuster movie, most of which have failed to even reach the production phase. This gave rise to the widespread industry belief that the books are unfilmable.

The only full-length feature version that made it to the big screen (until last year's spectacular Dune, Part 1 production) was released to great fanfare in 1984. It was directed by David Lynch, and starred local UW drama grad Kyle McLachlan.

Unfortunately, it was a notorious bust. I still remember waiting eagerly for the release, then sitting in an overheated downtown Seattle theater and fuming when the projector broke in the middle of the show, which proved to be a lackluster and unexciting event even when they did finally manage to get it running again. What a disappointment! It couldn’t hold a candle to the joy and excitement of a Star Wars movie launch from that era.

However, Lynch’s failure didn’t mean that these stories were really unfilmable. Perhaps only Peter Jackson, with his marvelous Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, has ever taken on a movie-making mega-project based on a widely-loved book series of comparable difficulty and aced it (and it’s interesting to note that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was also for a long time thought to be “unfilmable”, after its own decades-long series of production attempts and failures).

In any event, given the huge sweep of future historical time, the plots and intrigue, strange technologies, vital characters, mysterious organizations, warring cultures and action across the first three Dune books, it was never going to be possible to tell the whole story in one two-hour show. A TV mini-series in retrospect looks like a much more reasonable way to approach a story of this complexity and length.

It’s true that these SyFy channel Dune TV mini-series versions have special effects that are not that impressive by contemporary CGI standards, but the most compelling features of Dune for fans have always been more about the characters and the plots than the visual aspects, at least until the release of the excellent new Dune movie last year, which I previously reviewed. And these SyFy Channel series did do a credible job of presenting the characters and the plots of the first three books, a cinematic feat that has not been matched yet by any other producers or directors.

So while we’re waiting for the big-screen release of Dune, Part 2 in a year or two, these two TV mini-series do convey the essential elements of the first three books (Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune) for enthusiasts who can’t wait, and they do a very respectable job of it if you can find the shows to watch. Recommended.

Book Review: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (2014). Steven Johnson.

For those who haven't heard of him, Steven Johnson is probably one of the top science historians writing for popular audiences today. Awhile ago, I reviewed his most recent book Extra Life (2021), his thorough inquiry into causes of the rapid increases in human longevity over the past couple of centuries. It’s the latest in his still-growing list of fascinating works of history about science, technology and innovation, and their roles in the development of modern social life and its conditions.

He has several other good books which I hope to review in the future, but for today I wanted to go back to the first of his books that I read, which is still probably my favorite of his. It’s called How We Got to Now, which might seem to be an absurdly broad and overwhelming topic, if he hadn’t limited it to looking at the outsized impact of a few discoveries and technologies which have had truly profound effects on the way we live, and what we as individuals and societies now have and can do.

As his fans know, Johnson’s strength as a historian of science, particularly evident in this wonderful book, is to notice obvious things hiding in plain sight, the things we are all aware of but rarely stop to consider how important they are, and to then explore them..

He begins with a chapter on glass, for example, that ubiquitous material that humans have made for millennia by melting sand, and even used to create art, windows and useful household objects. In Johnson’s telling, though, glass only began to have a truly revolutionary effect on the human condition when a few amateur experimenters learned how to create lenses with it.

As their experiments led to greater understanding of light and the visible spectrum’s physics, other researchers and hobbyists discovered that a lens could cure many eyesight problems (through the creation of glasses), while allowing scientists to far more effectively see and study both the grand and distant (the planet and the universe, via telescopes), and the very small and near (such as microscopic-sized life forms in the body and the environment). These new tools caused an explosion in our scientific and practical knowledge of the material universe around us, and the bodies we inhabit, over a relatively very short period of historical time.

From there, he explores yet more new inventions which have been made possible through our steady progress in learning how to mold and form glass, including the development of fiberglass and glass-based composite materials; the development of the fiber optics at the center of our global communications networks; the television screen that has so profoundly changed our societies; and the glass vacuum tubes that were prerequisites to the beginnings of radio, television, and computing. And that’s all just in one chapter!

For each such area of vital innovation he describes, he tells the fascinating stories of the people who in many cases stumbled unexpectedly into their discoveries, then shows the ways key information was shared and passed along, and how the initial discoveries had their impacts amplified through social networks of other curious and inventive people. He does a great job of tracing other serial developments that flowed from early breakthroughs, and illustrating the mechanisms by which invention and innovations spread and change through society.

It’s a surprising , eye-opening and highly entertaining tour through the science history of a half-dozen of the most important human discoveries that have shaped the world in which we live, told by an expert and insightful narrator. Highly recommended.