Should be trending on Twitter
(thanks, Sarah)
The Mother Courage of Rock
She was skinny, quick-witted, disarmingly unprofessional, alternating between stand-up patter, bardic intonations, and the hypnotic emotional sway of a chanteuse, and she was sexy in an androgynous way I hadn’t encountered before. The elements cohered convincingly; she seemed both entirely new and somehow long-anticipated. For me at nineteen, the show was an epiphany.
Springtime 1976, I was living in the cinderblock building on the glorified median strip there where they split Highway 13, and one day I went over to this one girl’s apartment, she lived right by the guy who dealt me speed, and she said, “Hey, you know who you remind me of? You remind me of Patti Smith!”
Gave her a possum grin I’m still grinning.
Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
Related to stuff we’re talking about.
Cooking Up Change
They looked so young, the four college students who sat down and ordered coffee at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 1, 1960.
Legal challenges and demonstrations were cracking the foundations of segregation, but a black person still couldn’t sit down and eat a hamburger or a piece of pie in a store that was all too willing to take his money for a tube of toothpaste.
Those four freshmen at North Carolina A&T College — Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond — sat until the store closed, but they still didn’t get their coffee.
But that day helped spark other sit-in protests — led by young people like themselves — that spread throughout the South in 1960, energizing the civil rights movement. And the Greensboro Woolworth desegregated its lunch counter later that year.
It wasn’t the first time that food, or the lack thereof, figured large in the movement.
Dear Clusterflock
How do you deal with the unbearable rudeness of strangers? I’m serious, here, guys. It’s starting to really affect my life.
It could be anything — the guy who cuts you off when you’re clearly waiting for the men’s room, the guy who switches to the fucking right lane after he sees the “right lane ends 1000 feet” sign, the elderly couple who really ought to know better than narrate through the entire showing of The Artist (even after you finally yell “hey” after he says “he didn’t do it” – BANG!), the woman who starts doing her makeup next to you on the train, the omnipresent imbeciles yelling into thin air (oh, they’re on the phone).
I’m thinking of never going to another movie again (damn kids nearly ruined Red Riding Hood for me), or moving to a cabin in the woods. I’ve been checking Craigslist for jobs, but so far, nothing.
Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing
4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
(From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Via Brian Beatty.)
Happy New Year, Y’all
Smootch.
Dueling Banjos
If cool is a species of bullshit obscurity, culture is now divaricate enough that we can all be cool. It’s not gold anymore. More like corn.
— name (@georgelazenby) December 28, 2011
Taco Bell be having they shit look good on commercials but that shit is sick!!
— Te-Aria (@PEANUTBIOTCH) December 29, 2011
I am posting this post
because to now I have posted 1964 posts. So this will be 1965. And that was a beautiful year. I was just old enough to know that I wanted to be a grown-up woman. In 1965.
At least one of those grown-up women in the movies. Or to have a hit record.
NPR’s Winter Songs: Bill T. Jones on Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’
As cold weather descends on most of the country, we’re asking for winter songs — songs that evoke the season, and the memories that come with them. So far in our [NPR] series, we’ve heard some lighthearted or slightly wistful tunes, but this next song goes to a far icier place. It’s the choice of the celebrated dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones.
His winter song comes from “Winterreise,” — or “Winter Journey” — by Franz Schubert. It’s a song cycle about a solitary traveler in a savage winter whose heart is frozen in grief. Jones chose the last song in that song cycle: “Der Leiermann,” or “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man.”
“For me, it’s the musical arrangement underneath,” Jones tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block. “It speaks about a bleak landscape. And this bleak landscape takes me back to a day when I was in fourth grade out on the edge of town, looking at a snow-covered highway many, many yards away from my window — I should’ve been paying attention, but I was dreaming.
Damar, Mon Amour (out of context)
In context: Starlingo ii.
Damar torn from the flock.
What is Damar? Who is Damar? What is Damar?
This makes me very very happy
Phil Ochs: “I’m Going to Say It Now”
Achingly brief clip of Ochs in performance. Said to have been filmed at a Free Speech rally held in the spring of 1965 on The Oval at The Ohio State University campus in Columbus, Ohio.
Transit
Don’t eat so much. You don’t have to keep going until everything is gone. The Clean Plate Club is not looking for new members. You are already full, so why do you continue eating? You taste nothing.
Review your hardware-store shopping list. Arrange the items in two categories: things that must be fixed before they break something else, and parts for projects you will never start. Stop choosing tools based on whether you think they will outlast your span of years. Do not synthesize memories and likely scenarios as you did last time.
Werner Herzog, Into the Abyss
The paradox of this film is that it is both unremittingly bleak and rigorously humane.
FYI
All Hallows (I Saw Nick Drake)
Robyn Hitchcock. “I Saw Nick Drake.”
I saw him pass right through this place.
And we’re in bloom.
coming out of sleep
Ben and Casey (Aflac).
from the comments
Daryl Scroggins quoting Leslie Marmon Silko:
“I will tell you something about stories,
They aren’t just for entertainment.
Don’t be fooled
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off illness and death.
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.”
Peely
From the old blog of clusterflock friend Pete Ashton, his post in the aftermath of John Peel’s death seven years ago today:
In fact I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s not really about the music. The music is a conduit for something else, something quite intangible which I think comes down to that fucked up sense of juxtaposition he imposed on us. He made having an open mind cool, which is saying something when you think about it. Once you’d accepted that you could listen to every form of every form of music and appreciate it on its own merits then you could apply this to everything else in life. Any form of creative endeavour is worthwhile. The fact that someone, anyone, is doing something different and interesting becomes vital.
I looked for this Sunday before last…
to share after we saw Laurie Anderson in the new Performing Arts Center here in KC.
I found it tonight. I’ll leave it to you to piece together how it relates to threads we’ve approached and left unanswered, if an answer is attainable.
from the comments
Our lead bird dog Tuffy would bring Miss Nell gifts of terrapins and turtles, try to drop them in her lap as she shooed him away. We always wondered why that? But now I’m remembering the people who walked by his pen after fishing the woods ponds and swamps. We’d stop them and examine their catches. They were big on turtle soup and often had a big one on a hook or rope. Did Tuffy “get” that? That the big terrapins he captured and ran with in his mouth back to the one person who resisted his love were considered great prizes by some? I mean, dogs, cats, owls, they just want to be friends.
Jason Molina – Don’t It Look Like Rain
The wolf outside my door don’t need
Anymore of my blood
Of my bood
She don’t wait for nothing
nothing anymore
She’s watching for nothing anymore
Moon above my light
Starts fading out
I live for nothing anymore
I live for nothing
Redington
“And this is where it starts.”
Living in the county long enough, you begin to feel that you know every road, every creek, and even every cow; but there are still places hiding out there, waiting, scattered amid the leaves, in the lonely hollows.
But where are we? Where have we gone?
Somewhere Beyond the Corn.
Read more
from the comments
One of my favorite books, Kiln People, is about a society where you can create clay copies of yourself to do various tasks (menial, dangerous) while you do something else, then at the end of the day you download their memories back into you. This got me into a really creepy conversation with a friend about the difference between experiencing something first hand and remembering something. If the memory is yours (these clay copies have your personality, tactile sensations, everything) what are you losing by not experiencing it? Each moment is fleeting, at what point does something become memory instead of experience? Your senses take a measurable amount of time to transmit information and your body to physically react to things. Something 1/100 of a second ago, something 1/10 of a second ago, something 1/2 a second ago, something 5 seconds ago?
I think a harder question might be: would you rather travel the entire world asynchronously by surrogate and inload the memories, or travel 1/100th or 1/1000th as much but experience it all first hand in real synchronous time? I’m not sure which I’d pick.
