RIP Richard Harding, Owner of Chicago’s Quiet Knight . . .
. . . and before that, Poor Richard’s.
Good stuff in this Sun-Times obit on the Chicago scene, mid-sixties through seventies:
Los Angeles had the Troubador. Chicago had the Quiet Knight.
Personal note: In July 1978, after seeing the Stones at Soldier Field, the ex and I were walking down Belmont Avenue, right past the Quiet Knight, en route to our friend Mark’s apartment. Mark lived in a garret atop Schuba’s (still going strong at Belmont and Southport).
And that, children, was the night the Stones, along with Willie Dixon, paid a visit to the Quiet Knight and jammed with Muddy Waters. The night we walked on by, oblivious, and missed it.
Sally Cruikshank: “Make Me Psychic” (1978)
What got me started was the discovery that animation artist Sally Cruikshank has an Etsy shop where she’s selling watercolors.
Cruikshank is probably best known for Quasi at the Quackadero (1975), which is now listed on the United States National Film Registry. Or you may have seen the animated sequences she contributed to Sesame Street in the nineties.
My favorite, though, has always been Make Me Psychic. “Which way to the we-fwesh-ments?”
(Many of Cruikshank’s films are available for viewing on her YouTube channel, laughingsal, as well as on a DVD you can buy from her Etsy shop.)
from the archives: June 29, 2006
Radiographer (Perry Blake Now Owes Me $156):
My final was yesterday, orientation for the next semester is tomorrow, and today, with no plans, I sat around and was bored, that is, until I read a review of the Adam Sandler film “Click”. Memories started flooding me from my old life in Hollywood. I had to see the film because there were a few things I had to know.
R.I.P. Levon Helm
“The music starts around eight o’clock, and it’s over when it’s over,” he said of the Midnight Rambles at his home in Woodstock, New York.
I’ve been meditating on Levon Helm since his daughter’s recent announcement that the end was near. Wondering why I felt so torn up over his impending demise.
Now he has passed over, and I’m still working on it.
Entirely music
If you’ve been hanging out with me on clusterflock for a while, you may know that I am crazy-mad for Van Dyke Parks.
Okay, there is this interview and it focuses on VDP’s career as a child actor and it is really good and one of the things I like best is a recollected exchange between VDP and Lillian Gish.
Read more
Weather as a Spectator Sport
Now that I know my friends in Dallas County were spared the ravages of the tornadoes that hit north central Texas yesterday, I can laugh over this video from the town of Forney, east of the city of Dallas.
“It is coming our way, y’all. I swear to God, it’s coming our way. It is coming toward us, y’all. Get in the building.”
“Get in here now, Michael. Come on. Come here, Bradley. Come here quick. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Here he is.”
It’s not all that different from what my mother did when a tornado tore up our section of Dallas in 1957.
She walked down the block to a neighbor’s house and climbed up onto the roof with him to watch. I recall standing in our own front yard and observing this. I was barely three.
April Holy Foolish Palm Sunday Interview with Patti Smith
An hour-long interview with Patti Smith, endearing and, dare I say, inspirational.
I liked her music less and less after the first brilliant album; that much said, I worshipped her when I was in my early twenties and went to see her perform every chance I had. She was brilliant live. (And I have one of her guitar picks from the Radio Ethiopia tour.)
At bottom I have always admired her terrifically. She is tremendously endearing in this interview — both genuinely, unaffectedly girlish at 65 and mature and wise.
Watch or listen to this interview even if you do so in bits and pieces or while tending to other things.
The Emigrant Irish (Eavan Boland)
Like oil lamps, we put them out the back,
of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and thena time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example.
(Undye-ing gratitude to @Howlinow for her tip to the full text of Boland’s poem.)
Me Safe from a Dream (Ten Years After)
You’d think if I were going to dream about me and my friends being persecuted by Christians, I’d have set my dream where I grew up. Dallas, Texas. But I transferred it to an England I made up out of movies.
It’s a non-anecdote, really, as most dreams are.
This was over ten years ago, this dream, and I think what triggered it was a Vanity Fair cover featuring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike in a staged scene promoting a 2000 BBC serial based on Titus Groan, the first of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. The photograph annoyed me out of all proportion, as when I was a kitten of fifteen or so, my friends and I (the Gang of Six who are all still friends) were on a great Mervyn Peake kick, and I had clear notions, based largely on the Peake sketches, of how characters in any dramatization should look. When we were kids, we thought that if Dick Cavett were younger, he could play Steerpike in a Gormenghast film.
This alone is kind of funny. Imagine a group of kids at a Texas high school in 1969, avidly reading Mervyn Peake and sitting together in the school lunchroom to talk Gormenghast.
So: In the dream my friend Allen and I, together with Cooper Renner, were roving about England (generic, bucolic rural England) scouting locations for our own film based on Peake’s Gormenghast books.
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R.I.P. Peter Bergman (1939-2012)
Writer and comedian Peter Bergman, best known as a member of the Firesign Theatre, died last night of complications from leukemia. He was 72.
Richard Metzger on Peter Bergman:
The last time I talked to Peter was a few weeks ago. I’d picked up the Albert Ayler Holy Ghost box set, and there, on one of the live discs recorded in Cleveland in 1966, was Peter introducing the band! I called him up that morning and he excitedly told me about that event and we laughed a lot and I told him that he just HAD to write his autobiography.
“Pete, you’re the ‘Zelig’ of the rock era! You’ve been in a film with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Farrah Fawcett. You coined the terms “love-in.” You smoked a joint with Bob Marley and the Wailers when they were your opening act [True, the Wailers opened for Procter and Bergman in Boston. Pete told me the joint was “arm-sized”!]. You guys gigged with the Buffalo Springfield. You’ve worked with Spike Milligan, and now here you are with Albert Ayler, for god’s sake! I mean, come on! You have to do this!”
Futurama
My mother was one of the many who visited the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. I asked her once about the Futurama, a kind of ride into the future twenty years hence.
“You rode the Futurama?” I asked her.
“Yes. Of course.”
“Wow! What was it like?”
[Dismissively.] “Oh, we just sat in little cars that we didn’t drive. We rode around on tracks and looked at the future.”
California may legalize driverless cars.
from the comments
One day I saw on the kitchen counter a dab of what I thought was raw hamburger, and I ate it, only to realize it was our Dalmatian’s “Dash” brand of canned dog food. My mother was outside talking with one of the neighbors, and I ran outside, shrieking, “MA-ma! I ate . . . DAAASH!”
I also recall being so intrigued by ads for Stripe toothpaste that my mother finally caved in and bought it for me. Tried it. Didn’t like. Over-reacted. Stood on the laundry hamper in the bathroom and screamed, “I . . . HATE . . . STRIPE!” Strategically timed for an audience: the mailman.
smoke signals
What is odd is sitting in this bar and hearing “Radio Radio” all these years later.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
And it still resonates, even though we have more choice. Ostensibly.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
I want to bite the hand that feeds me.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
I want to bite that hand so badly.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
I want to make them wish they’d never seen me.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
Food Quirks
Foods I classed as acceptable when I was a kid:
Spaghetti without sauce, raw hamburger, cookie dough, cake batter, peanut butter sandwiches (no jelly), red Jell-o (no whipped cream topping), chocolate milk made with Quik, Boston-style brown bread, Boston baked beans, and Boston cream pie. Pineapple juice.
Nostalgia
Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain
Sure, Elmo loves you, but when’s the last time Elmo held anyone’s hand on the threshold of eternal night?
Despair
RT @excitedstoat: RT @Cirinda: @excitedstoat Then I learned about Wisconsin. And bratwurst. And peppermint schnapps. And despair.
— i despair (@DespairBot) February 24, 2012
Robert Wyatt on the music and stories of his life
The revelation that Robert Wyatt loves “Tubby the Tuba” will help me go on living.
“Tubby the Tuba” is a 78 record that was sung — well, mostly read — by Danny Kaye, who was a big hero in England after the war. It’s a children’s story, and there have been quite a few classical composers who have written stuff describing musical instruments for children. Benjamin Britten did a piece called Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Ravel did L’enfant et les sortilèges, Prokofiev did Peter and the Wolf — there’s a great version of that has David Bowie doing the reading, it’s lovely.
Normally, with these children’s stories, the metaphors are animals, like Aesop’s fables. And there is indeed a bullfrog in “Tubby the Tuba”, but mostly the instruments are the characters. The story is rather like the ugly duckling: Nobody likes the tuba and it’s considered a complete idiot instrument, but then the bullfrog teaches him a tune and everybody likes him. The nasty trumpet snickers and the violin shrieks with laughter, and Danny Kaye does little imitations of those. It’s just a joy for a child to hear a grown-up doing silly voices. The music is beautiful and, funny enough, it was written in 1945, which is when I was born.
Final Post
Site Politics. It’s odd to think of how close a group of people can become by way of a site–when so many kinds of distance offer cover, or a new path. One thing that struck home to me this year is the fact that among a small group of friends, several can have the worst year of their lives all at the same time. A person may think he or she is the only one around having it so bad, and then find that others are hurting as well. For me, the telling thing is: what does this knowledge that a friend is suffering do to one who is also suffering? In some, the thought that rises is–nobody could have it as bad as I do, and I don’t have time to take care of anybody but me.
One of the many things that makes Cindy the most remarkable person I have ever known is this: even if she is near death (no hyperbole here; last year brought serious illness and crushing psychological strain), even when she must struggle to meet each new day, she will go to a person in need and do her best to bring comfort and help. What I can’t abide when this happens is the injustice of her being thanked profusely–and then being cast aside, reviled suddenly without explanation. It’s as if such a friend, knowing Cindy’s own pain, knowing of her own fragile grip on life, were to say–I’m hurt, so you can go die now.
Please indulge my relentless aphorizing one last time: Blame is a room that only gets smaller, and the only way out is a desire to treat others well.
I have been so lucky to meet many lovely, bright, and loving people among all of you flockers. I won’t forget the faces that all seem so near me now. And I wish you all good things.
Scene from an imaginary video work
in the manner of William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton.
UPDATE: The link right above will take you to an hour-plus edit of “Stranded in Canton.” An Eggleston voice-over accompanies.
finally
About a year ago this post went up without much explanation:
Joel and Deron* have put on something over their jockstraps.
*The one he wears like a mask*.
*To block the image of Michael nesting in Troy Polamalu’s hair*.
*A frequent dream of Deron’s that leaves him feeling oddly aroused.
Originally created by Michael on September 9, 2010 and scheduled to publish the morning following the Super Bowl the post looked like this:
The NFL season has ended
And was changed by Deron on September 12:
I have the strength to say it. Deron, you are the handsomest man I know.
Farewell, Ben Gazzara (1930-2012)
Ben Gazzara died this afternoon, on the anniversary of the death of John Cassavetes on February 3, 1989.
from the comments
When I was a little kid and we lived in South Haven, Michigan for a while, the house my family rented had one of those old electric ranges with the built-in deep fat fryer. Please remember this was back before unhealthy fried food was invented.
My mom would buy pre-made doughnut dough, the kind in a tube (like biscuits or crescent rolls). She’d pop ‘em open and separate the flat die-cut doughnut parts and fry them. The doughnut holes, fresh out and almost too hot to eat, were golden heaven. We’d sprinkle powdered sugar on them sometimes. Is there anything better than fresh, homemade doughnuts? No.
I don’t remember what we did with the doughnut parts outside the cut circles. Maybe we cooked and ate those too, never speaking about it or looking at each other.
Comfort Food
You want two thick slices of meat loaf or three thin ones. Put mashed potatoes on the plate. Spoon some pan gravy on top. Butter two pieces of bread. Skip the green beans if you wish. Everything except the bread needs to be piping hot for this to work.
Unload the washer and transfer all of the clothes into the dryer. Medium heat for ninety minutes. Press the start button. Take that dog-eared poly-cotton blanket and make a little nest on the floor in front of the dryer. Sit on the blanket, with your back against the dryer door. Eat your supper.
from the comments
I know a guy from Ohio who worked as a long-haul trucker for a good while after high school. Then he did other things and we wound up working at a library together and after a time he became a big wheel at the MacArthur Foundation.
He claims to have met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam, and he told me that she stole his drugs, but I know he was just spoofing me.
