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.
Not my super-heroine persona,
but I am thinking that somebody should assume the mantle of The Sanitizer.
Wanted tea pots of any kind
Posted to the Dubuque Freecycle list:
Wanted tea pots of any kind the odder they are the better I live in Maq. but am willing to drive to Dub but not on bad weather days thanks in advance.
“Hit me!”
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.)
Films sans subtitles
My friend Charlie is now living in Buenos Aires in a house full of folks from all over the world, and among them is Lauren Stephenson, whom some of you may know. The other night Charlie and Lauren went to the movies. Their command of Spanish was not up to the task of following the film as its makers intended, and Charlie reflected on the experience of watching a talkie without a solid grasp on the words the characters spoke.
There were a lot of solitary and broody fishermen in boats and seaside bars. And one mouthy whore. There was a girl thrown into the mix, but her character stared vacantly into the distance so often that I wondered what she was looking at. Was she psychic? Did she make that guy have a heart attack just by squinting through the window? What was she looking for in the distance anyway? Did she like to find beavers in clouds? Again, not sure.
from the comments
Amish mullets are all ordnung in the front, rumspringa in the back.
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.
Phonograms
Patrick Feaster studies the culture of early phonography (the recording and reproduction of sound) and blogs at Phonozoic, where I’ve been hanging out for the past hour or so. At the 2011 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Feaster shared “Phonogram Images on Paper: 1250-1950.” You can listen to his presentation and download slides here. Just scroll down a little ways and you’ll find the links.
(via Excavated Shellac)
Lost in Translation
Xfinity recently started adding transcriptions of voicemail messages to its email notifications. Most of the time they’re non-sensical. Sometimes almost funny. Here’s a message to my wife Lois from our Dr. Allegar, reminding her of an upcoming physical.
“Hi this message is for Luis I’m calling from Doctor alexander’s(?) Atlanta to confirm your appointment for Monday at two o’clock for his vehicle immediately. If you could give us a call back here blaming me for Monday at two o’clock. Thank you.”
I can understand Lois->Luis and Allegar->alexander, but it took me a while to figure out that vehicle was the translation for physical. Why they asked us to “call back here blaming me for Monday” still totally eludes me.
Damar, Mon Amour (out of context)
In context: Starlingo ii.
Damar torn from the flock.
What is Damar? Who is Damar? What is Damar?
Viva la Sauna Svedese (Mah Nà Mah Nà)
Ponder this if and when you view The Muppets.
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.
You can’t wish upon a star motherless with pubic hair stuck in your teeth.
from the comments
Silly Derek. If you’d been a native Italian speaker, you would have asked “Could I get a glass of urine’s, please?”
I saw Deron in Oslo
At Akershus Castle.
Artifice and foam rubber
In fact, so much artifice and foam rubber is often used to create the sexually alluring woman that it’s sometimes difficult to know where the lady ends and the foam rubber begins.
Via dangerous minds by way of Roger Ebert.
from the spam
I will in a jiffy snatch your rss fodder to dwell abreast of any updates. Esteemed moil and much outcome in your profession efforts!
Corona Jackass Clawhammer. Clawhammer.
Courtesy of Brian Beatty. Says this kid is his new hero. I say yes. We need new heroes.
Summer Pudding
As many of y’all know, I am one of those Americans who loves England and Englishers. Sometimes people even think I may have lived there, I am so steeped in English ways.
But I’m still conflibberated by the concepts of Pudding and Dessert. I mean, I know what I consider pudding, and generally speaking, I’d place pudding within the larger category of dessert. Except for the Yorkshire pudding my English grandmother made. It is the idea that any dessert might be considered pudding that baffles me, and in any event I think I have got the idea wrong. I don’t know the rules.
So I give up. And dream of the perfect summer pudding, whatever that might be.
Great Big Saturnine Storm
At its most intense, the storm generated more than 10 lightning flashes per second. Even with millisecond resolution, the spacecraft’s radio and plasma wave instrument had difficulty separating individual signals during the most intense period. Scientists created a sound file from data obtained . . . at a slightly lower intensity period.
If you listen vary carefully to the audio file, you can hear Sun Ra.
headline of the day
Mexican police arrest drug boss “El Brad Pitt”
Marcella Riordan reads the Molly Bloom soliloquy
In honor of Bloomsday yesterday Tim Carmody pointed to this beautiful reading of the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Josh Rothman says:
In my opinion, the best audio recording of Molly’s soliloquy appears in the Naxos audiobook of the novel; it’s read perfectly by the Irish actress Marcella Riordan. As it happens, you can listen to the last few minutes of her performance on YouTube. Molly thinks about nature and God, recalls her childhood in Gibralter (she’s half Spanish), and relives the moment she accepted her husband’s proposal of marriage.
Joyce McKinney calls Pete Ashton
In honor of the impending release of Errol Morris’s Tabloid, I give you Joyce McKinney’s call to Pete Ashton.
Update: clusterflock’s visit from Joyce.
By Way of My Translato-Wheel…
I’ll attempt:
Los frijoles se ubican dentro del grupo de las leguminosas, que se caracterizan por crecer en forma de vaina y se caracteriza por ser uno de los alimentos que contienen más proteínas que constituyen hasta el 20% de nuestro peso corporal y sirven para el crecimiento, el proceso del metabolismo, la formación de anticuerpos que protegen de enfermedades y la producción de energía, entre otras funciones.
