GSH

This getting old thing sucks. Won't be any of my heroes left before too long.

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Reading the Constitution

Captain Kirk shows House Republicans, and Antonin Scalia, how it's done.

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Not Anne Francis too

Mostly remembered for her role co-starring with Leslie Nielsen in Forbidden Planet, i think Anne Francis as Honey West was my first TV infatuation.

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Happy birthday, Frank

Continue reading Happy birthday, Frank

RIP Leslie Nielsen

The boy scout line is probably the funniest thing ever.

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A sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe

Thought about this today, for some reason.

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Oh dear lord

Duke is in an uproar about a highly detailed "fuck list" that a recent female graduate made — in PowerPoint, complete with penis-size evaluations and dirty talk transcripts.

Just go read it. Totally not safe for work, unless you're my friend Libby.

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If i had a vote

Of the 15 acts nominated for the RnR Hall of Fame this year (Beastie Boys, Chic, Neil Diamond, Alice Cooper, Bon Jovi, Donovan, Tom Waits, LL Cool J, Dr. John, the J. Geils Band, Darlene Love, Laura Nyro, Donna Summer, Joe Tex, and Chuck Willis) i'd say that Dr. John, Laura Nyro, and Tom Waits are no-brainers. Gotta go with Joe Tex and Darlene Love for the other two.

But where the hell is Sir Douglas Sahm on that list?

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I think Abbie would have approved

Hoffman, that is.

Keep Fear Alive 10.30.10.

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Deep thought

I watched this movie over the weekend, and i realized that the true miracle of the 20th Century wasn't flight, or moon trips, or splitting the atom, or radio, TV or the internet, or defeating fascism or most other forms of totalitarianism.

No, the true miracle of the 20th Century was that Charles Bukowski became a poet, and not a serial killer.

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The Old Man's Song

Nothing like a rainy day to clean up a couple of years of detritus. Came across a scrap of paper on which i'd scribbled this poem a decade or more ago. I laughed even harder this time. It's from the book Songs are Thoughts: Poems of the Inuit.

I have grown old
I have lived much
Many things I understand
But four riddles I cannot solve

The sun's origin
The moon's nature
The minds of women
And why people have so many lice

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Fugs

Thanks, Tuli. Rest in peace.

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I'm hoping . . .

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Dear God, please don't let them do this

The Shagg's Philosophy of the World album is perfect just as it is.

This, though, is an abomination.

Concluding that this “amazing cacophony” would not necessarily make for good drama, Mr. Madsen said his original compositions would instead try to answer the question, “What did they hope they would sound like?”

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Century

For some reason, it never occurred to me that Jacques Cousteau and Howlin' Wolf were born 1 day apart, 100 years ago.

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Folk Song and Minstrelsy

Souvenir from the small amount of record store trawling i did on the recent road trip. Picked this up in Minneapolis, at the Electric Fetus.


It's a 4 LP box set released in 1962 and distributed, as far as i can tell, by the Book-of-the-Month club. It's a pretty good sampling of the northeast-midwest school of folk music of the 50s and early 60s, but lacking in any Delta blues or Appalachian folk. Listening to it the first time, nearly 50 years after its release, you can almost feel the dry tinder waiting for the spark of Bob Dylan to arrive to start the fire of the 60s.

There's two whole sides of Odetta, another side of Cisco Houston, a whole disc devoted to performances from the 1961 Newport Folk Festival, including one Joan Baez track, two more from Cisco Houston, including an unexpurgated version of "The Cat Came Back," and Pete Seeger singing "East Virginia Blues," the closest this comp gets to mountain music, a side of the Weavers, and more.

As i'm needledropping these albums to add to my digital library, i can't help but wonder what the BOMC subscribers must have thought when this monster box showed up in the mail in the spring of 1962? Was it mostly urban sophisticates who supported the BOMC back then, or rural folk who didn't have time to go book shopping, but liked to have occasional reading options? Was this seen as an eye-opening glimpse into a foreign and exotic culture, an attempt to make palatable for the mainstream something unique and homegrown, or something else entirely?

Full track listing here.

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Newsom

Quick note of thanks to Frank Heath of the Cat's Cradle and the folks at the Carolina Theatre for last night's Joanna Newsom show. It's not easy to make an auditorium show feel like a house concert, but that's we got last night.

Minimalist lighting certainly helped. No gels, no computer controlled gyrating spots, just plain stage lighting and house lights dimmed to about 1/3 power. I'm especially appreciative of not having to duck any spots aimed into the audience, which i absolutely hate. The sound was also impeccable, even up in the balconies. One of the biggest complaints show-goers make is that the people around them don't know when to shut up. Triangle audiences are generally better than other parts of the country, but i realized last night that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the solution is not to turn the volume up, but to turn it down. Newsom's main instrument is the harp, although she also played a few numbers on the grand piano. Her backup band was 2 violins, a trombone, percussion, and a multi-instrumentalist who mostly played recorder, banjo, with some electric guitar and a balilaika-like stringed instrument. And a very tasteful drummer. The sound never got overwhelming, and if you wanted to hear it, well, you had to keep quiet yourself. Which, amazingly, all of the audience members did.

Contrast that with the show i saw the previous night at the DPAC, which was a lot of fun for geezer-rock. The Moody Blues were never exactly cutting edge, thought they did play the Fillmore back in the day. I'd heard they'd become something of a lounge act over the past two decades, but that's not the case. They ran through a nice selection of their hits, and some lesser known album cuts. They haven't had Mike Pinder's mellotron sound since the 70s, but i think most people know them as Justin Hayward's band anyway, so that's probably OK. But again, i could live without dodging laser beams every 10 minutes. And that wall of sludge that passed for sound up in the balcony was pretty unforgivable. I've heard that the DPAC was pretty good acoustically, so maybe we just had the only seats in the house where bass notes hung on forever, but somehow i doubt it.

My only regret from the last two nights, though, is that somehow Leo Kottke and Los Lobos got booked into Duke the same night as Joanna. Couldn't do both, so i went with the one i'd never seen before.

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RIP Alex Chilton

Continue reading RIP Alex Chilton

Sad

Oh, man.

Yeah, i'm bummin'.

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Always enjoyable

Because really, who doesn't enjoy a giant inflatable beaver?

And FB users? Become a fan.

via CDR

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