Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Heartstrings...



I always liked the bipolar nature of this melancholy Mersey beat by Gerry and the Pacemakers. It's somewhat peppier than your typical pop ballad, arrangementwise, but the string tremolos, French horns, and reedy oboe lines very effectively evoke a melancholy fugue somewhere far east of midnight. The package is subtle: its topic is fairly standard heartbreak, but the narrator speaks as a trusted advisor --- sympathetic but not sentimental, encouraging but not patronizing. Like other songs I've embedded here, this one always struck me as being Important Music. The orchestration was a factor in that assessment, but there was more to it than that. It was a nontrivial treatment of an emotion that I was fully capable of, uh, emoting for a member of the opposite camp without all the accompanying complications of hormones. (It charted when I was in 6th grade, I think.)

Watch this performance now because it was pulled down a month or two ago for reasons I certainly don't approve of and therefore hold in contempt. I don't know the provenance of the clip, but it's just cool. Check out the nice Mondrian-inspired set, which is shown wide two or three times. This is definitely not a lipsync of the record. Possibly it's a live-in-studio clip, but it might be a lipsync of a prerecorded original performance specifically for the program. The chamber orchestra may have been present in the TV studio, or the band might be playing to the accompaniment of a prerecorded orchestra (bandsyncing, so to speak). Anyway, the performance is a little raw around the edges, which I like. The occasional tempo problems don't bother me at all because they lend authenticity, making it seem possible that some producer actually went through the expense and difficulty of throwing umpty-nine musicians together in a room for a live TV performance to entertain a mob of frenzied teenage girls one day in 1965.

I don't consider this a glitzy, over-rehearsed production number, but just a down-to-earth British Invasion band from Liverpool playing with a pickup orchestra to recreate the feel of the vinyl studio recording for an audience because someone actually cared. Gerry's guitar and the electric piano sound sincerely grimy, without cheapness, backdropped and framed in the ambiance of 19th century orchestral romanticism. Luxuriate in it.

Reality really *does* have a liberal bias

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Here's a concept called "epistemic closure," which I first heard of in a Paul Krugman blog post the other day. I'm glad to see this being talked about in mainstream media in serious, clinical terms rather than the usual flummoxed mockery that most of us are forced to resort to. The post spins off from another one by a guy named Jonathan Bernstein, which you can read here, but I think Krugman makes the point more accessible without even acknowledging FOX News and the like. Krugman sees epistemic closure every day in elite university culture --- in the field of economics, to be specific:

It’s been painfully obvious since the crisis broke that people at Minnesota, or even many people at Chicago, have no idea what New Keynesian economics is all about. I don’t mean they disagree, or think it’s garbage, they literally have no idea what the concepts are. And that’s why they reinvent 80-year-old fallacies when they try to discuss the subject.

The postmodern conservative separation from reality, whether in the Senate, or the corporate infotainment universe, or the freshwater school of economics (i.e., Friedman and the Reaganomics he spawned), is deliberately sustained by simply shunning any information that does not originate with like-minded people. Ironically, this anti-reality bias destroys one of the sacred free-market shibboleths: the "marketplace of ideas."

On the one hand I find this development quite chilling to contemplate. On the other hand, I think that the mechanics of de-evolution and decadence will take care of this species of hominids (homo ignoramus) well before mid-century. That's the good news; the bad news is that the world suffers immeasurably more than it really needs to in the interim.

So, as in all other things, Stephen Colbert is right.

It's Bedtime!

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So get back to in bed right now and I really, really don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!



Credit where due: I copped it from YouTube via BoingBoing. They all copped it from somewhere else, however.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Apropos of Earth Day No. 1, which I deliberately avoided commemorating until today:



This mellow Spirit number may be a bit old for even a precocious 59er to have fetished in 1970, but I remember the sounds, sights, and scents of the odd little hippie dungeon Fred's disinterested parents allowed him to construct in the basement. The room started out as a sort of studwall-framed CB radio shack, but was readily upgraded to alternate uses soon after I saw Easy Rider, bought my first pair of railroad stripe bell bottoms, and scored a nickel bag in the middle of the street during broad daylight in a Chicago suburb called Markham. I don't exactly remember the story of Fred's "evolution" at that point. But the important thing was that he tacked fake walnut paneling to the retrofitted basement studwall and we spent plenty of spare hours there listening to "underground" rock, including this song, gazing at blacklight posters illuminated by genuine ultraviolet tubes, and taking aromatherapy so to speak.

I don't know if there's any direct connection between the first Earth Day and "Nature's Way," but Wikipedia says that Spirit began recording the Dr. Sardonicus album in April 1970. I'm guessing yes.

15 minutes of fame

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If Andy Warhol were alive today he would have to retract his overquoted epigram, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Well, since he ain't and I am, I'll tell you why.

I've been mystified by the encroachment of Facebook into the lives of pretty much everyone under 30 and a shocking number of people over that age. I'll allow for the possibility that social media could possibly serve some minor constructive purpose in postmodern society even if I can't tell you what that would be. My best take on it has been that Facebook exists for people who want to star in their own reality show; people who understand that the only rule for becoming famous is to become well known. Social networking technology provides such people with a powerful, cannibalistic multimedia "platform" that they can use to dedicate their lives to collecting "friends" and "fans." For the mass of them, I will say, stereotypingly, the quest for said friends and fans involves relentless online disclosure of every thought fragment that causes three synapses to fire. And between those events, there's a world of fun to be had trolling banal data streams issuing from every other fellow contestant. When everybody "follows" everybody else on the World Wide Web, then everyone is world-famous for the duration. This amounts to a shocking rebuke to Warhol's vision, which in any case was more akin to a knowing wisecrack than a profundity.

But today I learned that the world is even better for fame-seekers --- right now --- than my dystopian best guess for the future. Big Hussein Otis sent me this New York Times technical bulletin on the latest colorful timewasting trend to emerge from social networking: a cornucopia of new business models based on specialized social networking web sites for sharing "TMI," as the post-Friends generation likes to say:

A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.

The reporter continues to reveal that "Blippy" members share access to their Gmail accounts with the company so it can publish their purchases, thereby greatly increasing the "Blippy" members' street cred by about a zillion I suppose.

In the pithy blurb he sent with the link, Big Otis observed: "those silly millennials --- making the world safe for fascism." I disagree. If this is where American society is headed there will be no need for fascism. After all, the Morlocks did not need to resort to fascism in order to feast on the Eloi --- all they needed was a scary-sounding air raid siren and a docile population with one highly motivating conditioned response. The siren in our real-world postmodern case of course, like the Sirens of Ulysses, is every bit as sinister as what the Morlocks used. But unlike The Odyssey and very much like the Eloi, few today are tied to the mast or have intentionally plugged their ears. So Silicon Valley scumbags glibly brag about their super new business models to The New York Times. Here's how it works: a generation surrenders its privacy to corporations in order to build a "fan base"; American society is rewarded with a terminal load of gangrene.

Update before I'm through: I don't fully or exclusively blame the "millennials" for their victimhood. Besides the prime mover in this sickening trend --- the information-industrial complex --- plenty of blame belongs to Baby Boomers and their clueless concepts of what it means to be a good parent and a good citizen. (Hoy, I need to get me to the prayer meeting.)

Double feature!

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For my wiseass friend, "Anonymous" (if that's truly your name), in the previous comments thread.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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You know she was a dancer / She moved better on wine



I don't have much to say about this lummox-rocker*, one of my favorites of all time, except that I heard it over and over again on an 8-track in Fred's hopped-up red GTO around 1970-way and permanently bonded with it. I consider it the original cowbell song, and the overdrive bass riff sounded like an entire orchestra to me (back 1970-way). The story behind the composing of Mississippi Queen was new to me as of tonight, though.

As an aside, the video accompanying this tune is almost A-OK with me, lummox-wise, except that the footage from Two Lane Blacktop is squashed left-to-right and the motorcycle stuff doesn't belong at all. I love the color of Steve McQueen's Mustang, too.

Oh yeah, and in terms of "this day in history," I just happened to learn on the FM robot oldies station that on this day in 1983 Mountain bassist Felix Pappalardi met his maker thanks to some "criminally negligent homicide" served up with a bullet by his wife, Gail. (Poor guy had to retire early due to partial hearing loss incurred by entertaining a generation of lowriding stoners. Peace, Felix.)
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* To the best of my knowledge, the term "lummox rock" was invented by Larry K.

Local color goes national

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Champaign, Ill., Mayor Jerry Schweighart (SCHWY-hart) has earned his 15 minutes of fame on HuffingtonPost.

See, Mayor Schweighart is a birther, and he can't understand why his opinion is controversial. It's controversial because President Obama's birth certificate has been produced for the record and the "Kenyan version" was exposed as a counterfeit before the election (but I'm too lazy to look for the links on a Saturday morning). OK, whatever. This is no surprise to residents who have long known of Schweighart's far-right-wing orientation. But he's some kind of imposing fascist strongman, or even a strong mayor for that matter. He generally avoids inflammatory interjections into city politics, other than the odd periodic stupid comment that a few wingnuts applaud and everyone else ignores.

Predictably, the comments thread on HuffingtonPost is every bit as clueless as anything Crazy Uncle Jerry might utter. According to a commenter called "What's going on," everyone should sign a petition to "help us citizens of Champaign get this guy out of office." Commenter "LouisGA" declares that at "Champaign town meetings" the mayor "insists on wearing his white sheet and hood." No, he actually doesn't.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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The Buckinghams made Joe Zawinul a lot of bread with their peppy cover of this extra-mellow number he wrote for the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1966. The Buckinghams version was a hit in the spring of 1967, during weather just like we're having in the backfilled swamp called Champaign, Illinois, by its Caucasoid settlers. So I'm putting it up here tonight as a bit of multisensory nostalgia for myself. I am a fan of the Buckinghams performance, but the original version isn't heard widely enough for my tastes. Besides, I think the Cannonball version even got some AM radio airplay in Chicago during spring 1967, but maybe on a "straight" station like WIND, WGN, or the thousand-watt wonder WBEE. So here it is.

Cannonball has long been a favorite of mine, busting onto the New York scene in the mid-50s sounding much like Charlie Parker, to my ear, without being a copycat. He was a meticulous technician on the alto, more deliberate and less of a daredevil than Bird; not as fast in terms of "clock speed," but always full of power, self-assurance, invention, and joy dee veever. There are no Cannonball acrobatics on this classic piece of soul jazz, though. The session was recorded live at "The Club," which was actually a large recording studio outfitted with a bar, tables, and invited guests for "the club atmosphere." One thing I enjoy about the whole album, which is entitled "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," of course, is how Cannon loves holding forth for the audience between numbers in his rich, stately voice. He had that easy manner with an audience that is needed to transform a great musician into a beloved entertainer.

Asparagus ranch update

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Regarding my April 14 post on the topic of Farmer Daddy Brand (TM) asparagus, old pal Anonymous asks the eternal question: "Are you sure those roots aren't upside down?"

There are a number of fairly plausible reasons why one might plant asparagus ass-up in the rich Illinois soil. But I'm going to have to go with "gut ignorance" on this one. See, they give you a set of occult details on how to prepare an asparagus bed --- how deep the trench, how much manure at bottom, how much soil over the "crowns," etc. But they never fucking tell you that the "crowns" point downward into the dirt, unlike any other crown devised by man or god. So I double-checked with the friendly girl at the nursery and she said I could just pluck them up and capsize them back down. Which I did. But now I've probably got them too deep in the pure manure so they may not like that.

If I have to start over, at least this time I'll only have to dig 6 inches out of the trench to re-prepare the bed, and there won't be any major root-busting or rubble excavation to put up with.

It's Bedtime!

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Time for a story. Once upon a time Old MacDaddy dug a big trench in his back yard, removed more dirt, roots, broken glass, bricks, and chunks of patio concrete than you could shake a stick at. Then he covered the bottom of the trench with manure (regrettably, not his own), then a very special blend of natural and store-bought soil, and dug little holes with a pointed stick to make new homes for 16 of his best asparagus friends (who had been living on the bottom shelf of his refrigerator for a month). Then he planted the asparagi, made cute little mounds of potting soil around them, and took a picture. Finally he fed them some nice fresh water. And that's how Farmer Daddy Brand Asparagus (TM) began its new life. The end. Now get back in bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!

Enjoying my hiatus?

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I yam! I could tell tales of physical prowess, ditchdiggery, lumberjackery. But I'm on hiatus, working through some sort of surprise urge to turn the world green and feed all the little birdies. So make up some tales yourself! In the meantime, I share the following words from the final pages of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, an instructive 700-page tome by Manly P. Hall (1928):

Ptolemy has been ridiculed for conceiving the earth to be the center of the universe, yet modern civilization is seemingly founded upon the hypothesis that the planet earth is the most permanent and important of all the heavenly spheres, and that the gods from their starry thrones are fascinated by the monumental and epochal events taking place upon this spherical ant-hill in Chaos.

It's Bedtime!

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Apropos of nothing: RIP Chris Kanyon and Herb Cohen.

Kanyon was a minor figure during the WCW "invasion" of the WWF back around the turn of the century, when professional wrestling was still entertaining. Beer-D reminded me that he was mainly known for entering the ring spouting some sort of lame monologue that ended with the rhetorical question "Who better than Kanyon?" Then, just about anyone would enter the ring and kick is ass seven ways for Sunday. It was his role. HuffingtonPost wants to make something of the fact that he was openly gay, but I doubt that gayness is particularly rare in the wrestling racket. In fact, gayness (and gaylike styling weirdness) were professional wrestling conventions for awhile, and treated in a fairly matter-of-fact manner insofar as opponents of the gay characters never resorted to any particularly homophobic invective. Professional wrestling must be one of the hardest things in the world to do, and "detraining" from it has to be much more complex than retiring from a mainstream athletic career due to the toll of steroids and brutal physical punishment. Peace, Chris.

Herb "Herbie" Cohen was a picaresque character, evidently capable of being a major league motherfucker, who was tightly enmeshed in the careers of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Tom Waits, plus a menagerie of unlikely lesser lights. The Barry Miles critical biography of Zappa tells of Herbie's alleged mismanagement of and skimming from Zappa's various record labels, not to mention a previous career selling weapons of war to African insurgencies and manning the barricades for the Mothers of Invention at a 1969 Berlin concert in which the Baader-Meinhof Gang (aka the Red Army Faction) turned things very scary for the group. Herbie was the subject of many in-jokes on Zappa's albums from the '70s, but they eventually had a non-amicable parting of the ways late in the decade. You can see Herbie rising like a wraith from a crack in the pavement in the surreal wraparound painting (verso) for the cover of Zappa's 1973 Over-Nite Sensation. Now he's a wraith for real.

Oh, and get back to bed! I don't wanna hear a peep outta ya! Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

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Some day I'm gonna be happy / But I don't know when just now



Old friend Larry K. was quite precocious, critical-analysis-wise, as compared most denizens of my suburban Chicago high school (not including Gurlitzer, of course). I remember him explaining back around sophomore or junior year why he liked rock and roll: each song was like a small unit of Truth, packaged in a 3-minute piece of music. To illustrate, he pointed to this song --- "Lies" by The Knickerbockers. And even more specifically, to the two-line extract above the video. I've always felt Larry's aphorism was highly pertinent, and a pretty good criterion for rapid assessment of a pop song's general worth.

As for this group, I knew little without referring to The Wikipedia. A bit of irony related to Larry K's identification of this late 1965 tune with Truth is that it is a dead-on knockoff of The Fab Four about a year and a half earlier. That observation never troubled my opinion of this little rocker, though, because it's energetic, tight, and respects its inspirational material. When I first saw the video I was going to comment on the gratuitous use of a tenor sax as prop for vocalist "Buddy Randell," but the wiki writeup indicates he actually played the thing in real life. Apparently not on this cut, however.

It's funny that these guys are trying so hard to sound like the original British Invasion band but aren't trying so hard to look that way. The suits kind of say "British Invasion," but most of the guys just barely manage to simulate the archetypal haircut (which was already pretty much out of fashion by the anyway). All rely on generous nerdles of "greasy kid stuff" (look it up), and "Randell" is looking quite a bit like a less-ugly version of Wayne "CC Rider" Cochran. That's because "Randell's" recording heyday was in the previous decade, scoring a big hit as Bill Crandle with The Royal Teens on the godawful "Short Shorts" from 1958 (sez Wikipedia).

As regular readers know, I cannot close this post without rating the go-go dancers. I think it's a pretty prime performance --- they add visual rhythm and freewheeling party atmosphere. The ladies know what they're doing, movement-wise, managing both free-form individuality and exuberant synchrony at once. The fine art of go-go dancing was ruined, in my opinion, by the self-consciously "freestyle" arrhythmic thrashing that emerged with psychedelia, and then, later, by the highly contrived efforts to prepackage dancing feminine sexual allure through excessive coaching and wardrobery.

Update: on reflection I think I have something backwards re the dancers. If refreshed memory serves, they wouldn't have called the gals in this video "go-go dancers." I think that term applied to the dancers they started displaying in cages (yes, cages) around mid-1966, perched on pedestals flanking the bands. The classic go-go dancer would have worn a mini-skirt and calf-sheathing go-go boots like the ones first fetished by Frank Sinatra's daughter, Nancy, in her winter 1966 hit. Then came the cages, and the acid-propelled go-go spazzery started showing up about a year after that. (This all comes from grade school memory, so I stand to be corrected by any cultural historians out there.)

Oh, okay --- double feature. Truth? Maybe not. But Beauty of a sort:

Um, *now* it's bedtime...

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...or, I Want This Motherfuckin' Bat Out My Motherfuckin' House!!!

Judas Priest! I'm trying to finish the iPad post and I hear this skittering skud, sort of like a dry leaf blowing across the floor in another room. Could be the wind, but the windows aren't that far open and the air outside is calm. Flying insect? OK, whatever. Mouse? Don't like 'em, but I have my ways of dealing with them. But uh-uh: there's a motherfuckin' BAT, as I say, about the size of a motherfuckin' crow, bouncing around the kitchen light like it thinks it's a moth! Its wingspan --- no kidding --- was about 12 inches! From crown to tail thingie, it was almost 5 inches long.

Do you know how to get a bat out of your house at bedtime? Well, I don't. Forfeiting the opportunity for YouTube fame, because I didn't feel like screwing around with the iPod Nano video camera but did very much feel like getting the bat out of my kitchen, I engaged in an absurd session of chase-the-motherfuckin'-bat-out-the-motherfuckin-house, armed with an Australian truncheon brought back from a vacation by DoubleE and a cardboard mailer. The object was to shepherd the bat toward one of the two open doors, at which time its famed sonar would show him the way to freedom in the wild black yonder. But it didn't. I did herd it to the open living/dining areas, but the creature just strafed me to continually for almost 10 minutes and had no interest in the open doors. Regrettably, then, I had to opt for a less humane mode of eviction, namely one involving a Crossman BB rifle. Not really my style, but then neither is sharing my home with flying rats. Extra pills and booze for me tonight.