Unretouched photo of Rudy foraging for billy goat gruffs for the evening meal (all three evening meals, actually). He also dismembers the baby ones and issues the parts to local trick-or-treaters, carefully swaddled in duct tape and gaily decorated externally with candy bar wrappers.
And if that isn't frightening enough for you, then here is one more seasonal music (of sorts) recording for you, just to make sure we don't leave The 59er with an empty bag this All Hallows Eve. And I present it with only one motivation in my heart:
TO DESTROY ALL YOU'VE DONE!
Actually, this live performance is less scary than cool. It has just what a scrawny teenage fan of horn bands and Hammond organs wanted back in the fall of 1968. But I don't know why Wikipedia calls this a "psychedelic" band when, in the next sentence, the writeup hints at just what makes this cut so striking: it's kind of like Screamin' Jay Hawkins accompanied by James Brown's Famous Flames.
Fire, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown (1968, from a live performance on "Top of the Pops,", BBC), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.
In keeping with our dual-use scary music thrust this week---Halloween and election day---we (by which I mean "I") present the debut cut on the debut album of King Crimson:
TWENTY FIRST CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN!!!!!
DARE DEHDEHDET DET DEHHH! DEHHH! DEHHH! DEHHH!
Odd thing about this album is that all of the other tracks on it are laid back, and even "pretty." The album cover nails vibe of this song, if not the whole album.
21st Century Schizoid Man, King Crimson (1969, "In The Court Of The Crimson King: An Observation By King Crimson," reissue Discipline Mobile Group DMG0501), cover art embedded with music, the latter via YouTube, for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.
Editor's note: oh, wait, there's more!
...as presented by "Seasons," possibly the most adorable string quintet you've ever seen. Works perfectly chartwise, performance-wise, and production-wise (especially that big cavernous sound that stays percussive and punchy all the way through). Unfortunately I can't find out jack about the group on the web. But it's embedded here via YouTube, for the same purposes noted above.
Here's for Big Hussein Otis, who thinks Henry Mancini is the epitome of suave sophistication, and for The 59er, who wanted to hear something scary.
As I said once before, I have nothing against Mancini except when his orchestra is performing crap. Have no fear about this cut, though; it's a killer. The signature reverby/tremelo-ey bass line fits perfectly with the harpsichord (real or simulated, I don't know) melody, and the lush orchestral bridge is unexpected (if you've never heard it) and otherwise perfect---a nice soundtrack for you and your femme fatale to enjoy while sharing a martini after having strangled her husband for the insurance payoff. And then, there's the jazzy, schmaltzy outchorus for... you know what.
I happen to know this song because it was the theme for WGN-Channel 9's marquee monster movie showcase, Creature Features. I can tell you for a fact that, back when Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were household names, this tune sounded really, really good in conjunction with some weed and some "hobo eats" (i.e., Hostess brand snacks, potato chips, and Dr. Pepper).
One more thing: turn it up loud.
Experiment In Terror, Henry Mancini and His Orchestra (1962, "Experiment In Terror," RCA Victor LSP-2442), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.
Persia, Iowa: realm of the noble Rep. Steve King, a mile down the road from the simple country demesne of Rusty and Lucky (the Baby Boom's answer to Ma and Pa Kettle). A quick, crowd-pleasing creekscape, lightly processed using the Adobe Bridge RAW processor and Photoshop for exposure and color correction, fussily cropped. RAW is a file format presenting raw data from the camera sensor. The Bridge RAW processor gives you an insane amount of easy controls that are often sufficient to whip out a quick, crowdpleasing landscape.
I probably put as much effort into this shot and the postprocessing as Larry Kanfer puts into any given "prairiescape," i.e., not much, but at this point I don't have a way to sell mine for $600, bare, like Kanfer does. Kanfer's work has ornamented the great rooms of Champaign-Urbana Junior League types for over 30 years now. Myself, I've always felt his photos lack soul, and many of them appear short on aesthetics and even proficiency. But what do I know about it if an auto dealership heiress wants to pay easy money for the stuff?
Editor's note: any problems with the aesthetics of this image are the fault of the creek channel and not the photographer. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Editor's note: RubberCrutch has returned from a brief, uneventful tour of a midwestern state that begins with an I. The "Honey, I'm home" noise is a copyrighted feature of this blog. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
For the umpty-ninth time, tonight on NPR this time, I heard some belligerent-sounding asshole at a Nevada state Republican party convention bluster about how sick he is of government not following the Constitution. Predictably, he was speaking in the context of right-wing outrage about the "government takeover" of healthcare. The reporter, of course, failed to ask old Chamber-Of-Commerce Dick if he was aware that the legislation was passed and signed by a duly elected Congress and President, respectively, and has not been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
Well, OK, the guy is entitled to an ignorant opinion. Sound bytes like I described above wouldn't souse me with hate, though, if these same people were also blathering on the news shows about things like this --- Soviet-style security policies that vomit on due process (a Constitution thing, you know) when a licensed commercial pilot declines to submit to a "backscatter" full body scan after clearing an airport metal detector. These scans are capable of clearly imaging a subject's genetalia and other mammalian protuberances, and in the absence of reasonable suspicion related to smuggling nonmetallic weapons or ingested cocaine-stuffed condoms, are useless except for titillating bored TSA workers. So... why chorus of silence, wingnuts?
It's almost as if Republicans, libertarians, and Tea Partiers are angry only about things they're told to be angry about.
This is another iPhone photo taken during my spontaneous 60-mile, shoulder-trashing bike ride last Monday. The "developed" image shown here is actually somewhat more ambitious than it may look.
First, the sun blinded me when it peeked through the gaps between as each coupling passed, immediately alternating with deep shadow during the late afternoon. The finder was barely any help in framing. For that reason, shutter release timing was complete guesswork.
Second, the iPhone's digital shutter is pretty unresponsive compared with any mechanical shutter, and changes in the available light may slow it down in unpredictable ways. This "dynamism" further challenges the photographer trying to guess when to release the shutter.
Third, the scene was a worst-case example of extreme backlighting, which makes it very difficult for the low-end camera sensor to expose either the background or the foreground correctly.
I think the result is interesting. Making only two exposures, I lucked out and framed the train just as I'd hoped to. The classically bad lighting was treatable in Adobe Bridge, and it even gave me a bit of aesthetic lens flare radiating from upper left. The exposure and color adjustment tools in Bridge are very good for bossing pixels around; don't know why they don't use the same interface in Photoshop, but there's probably a reasonable explanation. Anyway, the exposure tools let the user get very selective about scene exposure, information recovery from blown-out highlights, and finding detail in deep shadows, even with an underwhelming cell phone camera. The Bridge detail tool helped a lot to define edges in the deep shadows. And the interface for the color adjustment tools made it possible to goose up color that was almost invisible in the raw exposure, in this case the greens and golds in the field beyond the carriage coupling and even some blue, reflected from the sky, in the rail heads.
The other interesting aspect, which was none of my doing, is the significant skewing of the railroad cars in the opposite direction of their movement. It's almost an animation-type motion-exaggeration effect like you might see in a cartoon. This effect is accounted for by digital shutter technology, which scans what the lens sees similar to how a photocopier captures the image of whatever is laying on the platen. A digital shutter can create other random interesting effects, too: if you snap someone who blinks shortly after the shutter is activated, for example, the result can be a portrait in which the subject has one eye opened and the other closed.
Hi friends. How are you? I am fine. However, when I feel that this blog is looking lazy I like to provide a status report to deflect your negative attention from my laziness.
I started on a fairly ambitious post to denounce whistledick futurists, by whom I mean authors who pose as prophets or sophisticated insiders on the basis of ideas they've evidently gleaned (i.e., stolen) from dystopian fiction and Road Warrior movies. As I try to develop my own reliable synthesis of what's going on in this unsettling era I'm gathering information from history, which I believe is really important for context (and to avoid becoming a whistledick futurist myself). The stimulus of my wrath on this topic was a widely praised post by Douglas Coupland, the sort-of coiner of the term "Generation X," who appears to be an arrogant, under-informed hipster still huffing the vapors of his high-octane heyday. This past week I dedicated several hours to composing a high-dudgeon takedown of Mr. Coupland's condescending drool. But I couldn't get it right, and finally realized that a much more moderate and even-tempered response would do just fine. So I've scrapped the previous effort and will try again this weekend. To me, responding is still a worthwhile task because I feel many of us are buying into stock doomsday scenarios that paralyze our spirits. My preferred approach to social criticism is to avoid everyone's conventional wisdom, even if it comes from people who feel special because they had an Internet login in 1985.
Pictured above is a "cathedral of the prairie," a term I quote from a forgotten author who doesn't readily rise to the top of a Google search. I snapped it on the inadequate iPhone 3G camera, then doctored it in Bridge and Photoshop to approximate how I saw the scene when I felt compelled to interrupt my bike ride to document it. That selfsame bike ride, which took me halfway through Piatt County and terminated (before turning back) a few miles north of Deland, Illinois, ended up setting me back several weeks, sprained-rotator-cuffwise. Ended up being on the bike 90 minutes more than planned due to being waylaid on rural roads crumbling into gravel and dirt. Too much heavy lifting for Mr. Supraspinatus, evidently. So I've been pussing around the house this week instead of tackling the heavy lifting of blog augmentation.
Then there is the strange case of me actually finishing a woodworking project. It's pictured at the right, hanging under a kitchen cabinet. It may not look like much, but it involved some careful measurements, routing and sawing, and stock and stain decisions so it would match the in-place red oak woodwork. I finished cutting and assembly a year ago, then proceeded to stare at the bare wood, despairing about how to mount the thing in a non-remedial way. Finally, a recent chat with a cute lady carpenter on a completely different topic (strictly business) inspired me to buy a Forstner drill bit, apply a little mental elbow grease to hardware selection, then stain and seal it, and hang it up. Click the picture for a bigger view if you like, and note the scroll-sawed arch cut of the sides to match the arched sides of the spice compartment to its upper right. That's some pretty hot-shit woodworking for me, actually. Tonight I'm field testing the shelf to house a cute little AudioSource power amp with an old Sports Walkman (boasting "Mega Bass Groove") jacked in, and a pair vintage B&W speakers. It works!
Finally I've been distracted this past week by the unexpected return of some epic BP numbers, with my favorite being 182/88 (nowhere close to my "personal best," incidentally). I made an executive decision to return to my previous med protocol, which the doc had relaxed in response to my significant weight loss and general awesomeness as a physical specimen. The numbers are returning to where they were, which had been consistent with what might be expected for a world-class athlete at rest or a little old lady on life support.
And those are some reasons why it seems I've been neglecting you, but I assure you that you haven't left my thoughts during this hiatus. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
A seasonal perennial for you: "Autumn Leaves," performed by Stan Getz, plus a guitar, brushes, and a high-hat. This tune has been performed live more than once at the RubberCrutch party sanctuary on New Year's Eve, featuring Big Rock Head and others. The YouTube poster didn't provide any record or session information, and I have no way to venture a credible guess. Anyway, this one's just to listen to. If you like, compare with the inexplicably upbeat versions on YouTube by the great Bill Evans or Chet Baker and Paul Desmond. I think most would agree that this composition is intended to be played slower and quieter, in a pensive mode, like autumn... and like Getz does here.
Autumn Leaves, Stan Getz (date and performance information not known), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.
As Hedley Lamarr once said, "My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives."
Just cuz! An all-too-rare specimen of Lummox Rock from Frank Zappa leading (in my opinion) his best band ever, period. (Thank you for your attention to this matter.) As much as I love Zappa, I feel he spent way too much time expressing obscenity, disrespect for women, and pointless vulgarity. This performance, however, is not any of those: it's a straightforward and witty expression of an ultra-lewd sentiment that probably has overtaken every gentleman reading these words at a certain point. I'd be very interested to hear any version of this viewpoint as expressed musically from the female point of view, preferably in a Lummox Rock format. In fact, I may know of one from the '90s, but that will have to wait. Meanwhile, if you know of any, do tell.
And as with all Lummox Rock, plug in your headphones and turn it up louder than you can stand. Just fuckin' do it!
Dirty Love, The Mothers (1973, from "Over-Nite Sensation," DiscReet MS 2149), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.
...Politey being the antonymous designation for Rudy, the cartoonlike gentleman who spends much of his life in this apartment window, which is located 7 feet east of a Joe Pye Weed and dwarf coreopsis growing between my driveway and my fence, on West Healey Street in Champaign, Ill. Rudy has inhabited this planet for a full 67 years as of today. Coincidentally, also on this date in 1959, the first episode of The Twilight Zone aired on CBS. Also appropriately, he shares a birthday with Richard III (1452), the allegedly deformed, hunchback English king who served as the objective correlative in the children's nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty," and was probably seriously slandered by Shakespeare on behalf of the Tudor monarchy a century after he died; Groucho Marx (1890), who was somewhat less funny than Rudy during his career; George McFarland (1928), the runt called "Spanky" in the Depression-era Our Gang/Little Rascals film shorts; and Maury Wills (1932), a National League base-stealing speed demon during mid-century previous.
Rudy's favorite expression is "What're you doing?!?" His favorite pastimes are lurking in his window waiting for Billy Goat Gruffs to carelessly trespass, reporting hallucinatory sightings of nonexistent species of birds patrolling our feeders, and making shit up as he goes along. He coins at least four neologisms every week, and believes that each and every one of them have been part of The King's English since Humpty Dumpty roamed the earth.
I offer all of the above observations in complete earnest, but without so much as a microgram of disrespect. He is an sweety-pie American Original, and by far the least generic neighbor I've ever had. Happy birthday, Fatso!
Here are E's band intros for the current incarnation of the Eels, recorded about a month ago in "København," as the native Swedish say. This is pretty much how the formality went at the Metro in Chicago on 1 October 2010, and it gives a good feel for E's style of showmanship. Be sure to stick around for "Talkin' 'bout Knuckles," aka "The Knuckles Theme Song."
Incidentally, the band isn't always styled with Ray-Bans and "epic" beards; the look seems to be part of some sort of running gag by or preoccupation of the enigmatic Mark Oliver Everett.
Live Band Introductions and Talkin' 'bout Knuckles, E and The Eels (8 September 2010, from a live performance at Store Vega, Copenhagen, Denmark), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.
Phone snapshot from a Friday evening field trip to the Metro in Wrigleyville, Chicago, to see The Eels, 1 October 2010.
Dramatis personnae, from left: P-Boo, Koool G Murder, Knuckles, Mark Oliver Everett (E, band leader), and The Chet.
The shorties and I have seen this band four times now. They first caught my ear, and the offsprings', on the University of Illinois college rock station in the late '90s with "Novocain For The Soul." Geezers: you've probably heard something by E in a movie or on TV (click through the Wiki link above). The man has been---and appears to remain---a tortured soul, who has been plagued not only by the loss and alienation well known to anyone who explores so-called romantic love, but traumatic losses to death during more tender years. Two of the performances we've seen have been skewed toward his more introspective, even bordering on maudlin, lyrical compositions. They are outstanding and unique compositions, often voiced with anachronistic instruments like the harmonium, the saw and bow, the autoharp, and even a drumkit fashioned from vintage luggage and (I think) a leather ottoman. I'm biased toward shows with more upbeat content, humor, and electric power. The Metro show fell into that latter category, mostly delivered by three guitars (including E's odd-looking collection of Danelectros), bass, and drums.
I'm not so good at remembering song names by latter-day bands these days, so I can't authoritatively report the set list. (Beer-D or Dutch Boy, Esquire [freshly minted by the Illinois Bar 2 hours before the show], feel free to document it in the comments.) As usual, E provided a little clowning with, apropos of nothing, two summer-themed oldies: "Summer In The City" and Billy Stewart's arrangement of Gershwin's "Summertime" (during which the snap above was, er... snapped). I say "clowning" because during "Summertime," he flung ice cream bars, popsicles, and Drumsticks across the main floor and in the balcony of the small 19th century auditorium. I was trying to catch a Drumstick when I should have been shooting pictures.
Here's a live TV studio performance by the Eels With Strings lineup we saw several years ago at the Park West in Chicago, minus their glamorous eveningwear. This is the most upbeat tune I remember from that tour. Note the drumkit. Also note E's choice of vocal microphone, the classic "green bullet," a vintage-design, low-def analog radio dispatcher's mic adopted by the postwar generation of blues harpists to help amplify their Hohner Marine Band harmonicas.
Hey Man (Now You're Really Living), Eels With Strings (2005, live performance on "Later... With Jools Holland," BBC Two), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.
RubberCrutch, 14-watt illuminatus and man about town, earns his living as a simple country editor, as if toiling on a chain gang beside Larry Fine, making little sentences out of big ones.
He has 30 years of professional experience in written and visual communications, including journalism, public relations, advertising, technical publishing, and photography. In connection with some of those roles he has won several unimportant awards.
[Editor's note: in archived Fifty50 posts, all references to one "StuporMundi" in fact pertain to our hero, RubberCrutch, unless otherwise noted. Thank you for your attention in this matter.]
It is the mission of this weblog to offer you, at least half the time, an assortment of essays and pictures pertaining to current events, aesthetic studies, psychological inquiries, and everyday tomfoolery, presented in a jocular setting that is suitable for Mom, Pop, Junior, and Sis, as long as Mom and Sis do not object to literature that sometimes contains words such as "asshole" and "fuck."
