tweet of the day
from the comments
Casey, the stub at the end of my full-windsors is a little bigger than tiny. I share your neck size.
Thanks Rick. I often have trouble getting the stub into the keeper. Especially after a few drinks.
Higgins-Madewell
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.
The Trip, streaming on Netflix
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s dueling Michael Caine impersonation movie, The Trip, is now streaming on Netflix.
Mostly improvised and highlighting the duo’s penchant for dueling impressions of famous actors, the film follows them as they test their friendship while sampling the best restaurants in Northern England.
To see if that interests you, you can check out this clip, previously, on clusterflock.
(via @spavis)
Sheila’s Oak Park Walking Tour
Called to mind by the Where we are today thread.
Friend #1: I can’t believe these are all single-family houses.
Friend #2 (sotto voce): Ah, the voice of the eternal proletariat. “Why, five families could live in that house!”
scenes for a film from Sheila’s email
1.
After our first (failed) graffiti attempt on Wednesday, Charlie and I went to a little place called Council Hill Station for coffee. A storm was in full force, and lightning hit something very near by. The owner of the place wondered if he should go over to his house and “shut off the Internet.”
2.
Charlie noted that he seemed easily distracted, even by his own thoughts.
The arrival of a big truck passing through “town” caused him to bolt out the door in the middle of a conversation about Jackson Hole.
3.
Before the scene in which Charlie is standing at the counter with money out and the owner is laboriously pointing out locations of nearby towns on a map and briefly fretting that the town of Leadmine has been omitted (“that’s not good”) when he gets a phone call and tells the caller that his partner/wife is not around, then wanders off to the kitchen (or somewhere). We can hear the occasional sound of his side of the conversation. And then the sound of water running.
Our perception of time grew very strange indeed.
4.
Also, the recorded fiddle music that sounded as though it would repeat for all eternity.
And the bad cell phone connections. Charlie and I both got calls, and we were shouting and repeating till the connections dropped.
Charlie to his father: “You can eat fruit . . . ? He said you can eat fruit? You . . . can . . . eat fruit?”
We Won Backyard Garden of the Year
Kristopher designed this four years ago. Subcontractors did the structures and masonry, we did the garden. This year, the garden grew into the space it was meant to be.
Laura Marling || A Creature I Don’t Know
Via Lauren Stephenson, who has up and absquatulated to Buenos Aires (in truth, the move was a long time in the making) and who sent this video to my friend Charlie, who’ll be Buenos Aires-bound come November.
I love it when my friends from different realms mix and match.
from the archives: April 28, 2006
I always wondered why Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown decided to visit Israel and hang out with Ariel Sharon. Tonight, while eating Country Fried Kalebone™ at phATLanta’s Soul Vegetarian restaurant on N. Highland Avenue, I finally found the answer.
The legacy of Mr. Peppermint
In memory of Mr. Peppermint, friend of clusterflock, Teresa R., sends two Peppermint-related links.
One: How Mr. Peppermint’s son became the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers.
Being the son of Mr. Peppermint has always figured into Gibby Haynes’ myth, as has a past that includes being an “A” student and basketball star at Lake Highlands High School and an accounting/economics major at Trinity University in San Antonio. Almost from the get-go, Gibby has been asked about his old man in interviews–”He’s, like, the coolest guy in Dallas,” he says on this particular occasion–and, in turn, Jerry has become something of a cult figure among Butthole fans who still find the images of father and son so much at odds. Gibby was headed for the straight life till he and guitarist Paul Leary steered the van down the crooked path in 1981, formed a partnership that would eventually lead to the Butthole Surfers, and played a San Antonio art-gallery gig where surely they were embraced as the avant-garde: Nail Gibby to the wall and call it “art.” But how Gibby got from one place to another is a story seldom explored and rarely told.
Two: How Mr. Peppermint encouraged Erykah Badu to sing.
First time I met Erykah Badu was in February ’96, at the old Grinders on Lowest Greenville, where she’d poured coffee just a few months earlier. It was a full year before her debut Baduizm was released; those Grammys were still in the distant horizon. It was her first interview, her first chance to tell her life’s story — the transition from Booker T. to Brooklyn, from a would-be with a demo to a singer with a recording contract. And one of the first things she said that afternoon was: She became a singer in large part because of a man best known as Mr. Peppermint.
Which, finally, reminds me of the Erykah Baduh tweet I made yesterday.
American Juggalo, directed by Sean Dunne
American Juggalo is a look at the often mocked and misunderstood subculture of Juggalos, hardcore Insane Clown Posse fans who meet once a year for four days at The Gathering of the Juggalos.
I found this in Andrew’s Stellar links, and was immediately pulled in. Even though it’s twenty three minutes, it’s video for the web that makes that irrelevant. Sad and beautiful. Highly recommended.
Update: There is some nudity, and drug and alcohol use, so be careful at work.
Strut
Après lunch at the sub-urban lesbian bar. My dear friend Miss Mindy struts her stuff.
Three “perfect” self-contained sentences a day…
Tussel bore left on the wye West–North, West-northish. Nosing his old de Ville into wind-chill rushing across glacial tundra and down, from a thousand miles ahead. Forty-five miles an hour, nine miles a gallon, Tussel gripped the wheel, leaned into the accelerator, pressing the head-wind.
I already screwed up. They’re not “self-contained.”
headline of the day, II
Two Denver men charged after taking their dead friend for a ride
tweet of the day
Meg Hourihan on the passing of her cat, Bodhi
The semester before I got Bodhi, I took the best class I’ve ever taken. We studied Buddhism, Deconstruction, Emily Dickenson, and Walt Whitman. I read every word of “Leaves of Grass” again and again, and in times of great sorrow I always come back to it:
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.All goes onward and outward–nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
from the spam
My friend and were discussing schemes to conquer the world and we found the planning stages to be quite burdensome. So much to take into consideration! Our ultimate goal is to obtain enough financing to build a weapon capable of deflecting an asteroid to put it on a collision course with the planet Earth. With this technology we could easily hold the entire planet hostage and enslave the entire human race. Any ideas how we could finance this? Thanks, everyone.
Miss Lucy
is becoming Mrs. Lucy today. On Thursday, I helped her get her hen on, in a swanky hotel bar.
I’m immensely honored to be attending her and Ross’s wedding, and the succeeding reception-crawl. I will bring a real camera to that.
Read more
Love Can Always Find You
We met today for a celebration, to mark the marriage of a mutual friend. She was just back from the beach. ”Marry me,” he said. ”And I accepted,” she told us. She wore a white halter top and a white wrap skirt, a two-piece bathing suit of the same shade underneath, no shoes. The groom had on casual attire, with flip flops. They went for dinner at a bayside restaurant, then back to the beach.
They had gone the long way around to find each other. She was born and raised in New York City, to Greek parents in the restaurant business. She had several careers, ending up in the news business in D.C. When I met her decades ago, she talked about Latin music, about salsa. The groom, born in Puerto Rico, is a longtime civil servant. He’s also a musician. He owns four guitars.
But I had to wonder about this hasty marriage to a man she’d been seeing for five months. Then, he came into the room. He was a stunner. She was glowing. They talked about moving by the end of the year, maybe to Spain. Her dream is to be on a plane, on New Year’s Eve, flying to Madrid, her new husband at her side.
The thing is, these aren’t babes. They are at or near the age when they can draw retirement. As in Social Security.
You would never know it. They’re sleek and fit, all that dancing. And one thing was so obvious it filled the room with sweet certainty: My long-time friend is with the love of her life. And the feeling is mutual.
Irene
Our New York and East Coast friends, keep us posted.
Mondrian Drop Ceiling
Thought I’d share something I’ve been working on.
With a lot of help, I created this Mondrian style drop ceiling. When my friend was installing a drop ceiling in my room crowded with ductwork and utilities, and the ceiling wasn’t going to come out very uniform, we joked that we should just make the ceiling of all sorts of different size panels. And then it hit us.
So, we plotted out the desired locations for rails and determining the panel shapes, and fit everything together, unpainted. The panels were labelled and removed for painting. Next, running complex computer simulations, a second friend and I came up with the color pattern. The rails were painted in enamel, mini rollers were engaged, and the whole thing was put back together again very carefully.
It is surprisingly difficult to get a complete photo of an entire ceiling.
Much love and thanks to N, D, and R.
More photos of the process on my tumblr.
I saw Deron in Oslo
At Akershus Castle.
Miss Nell in New Orleans
I’m not sure what I did to this photo to chop it up, but it is just a copy of the original. Anyway, Miss Nell is on the left, before she married and had children. She was in New Orleans with her friend Lois and her other friend Lois. I told her, “You looked right sultry in that picture.” She said, “Lois probably was driving me crazy.”
A Talk with Blaine Dunlap
In March [Unfair Park] screened one of the greatest films made in or about Dallas, director Blaine Dunlap’s 1973 Sometimes I Run, about Stanley Maupin, who worked for the city’s Public Works Department flushing downtown’s streets in the wee small hours of the morning. Some Friends of Unfair Park said they’d seen it before, in high school long ago or in a sociology class at SMU. For most, though, the blue-tinted black-and-white short was brand new, a riveting revelation — 21 minutes’ worth of downbeat cinéma vérité, Pennebaker rolling with the Public Works Department as his leading man played country Kerouac.
And a couple of weeks ago, Unfair Park’s Robert Wilonsky published this feature on my dear long-time friend Blaine: Sometimes I Direct: A Talk With Blaine Dunlap, Who Once Captured Dallas Better Than Anyone.
