The Gift of Music
Your new friend gives you something. He gives you a record. It isn’t his — it’s his older brother’s. But that’s okay, because the older brother’s away.
The record doesn’t make you sing like the records you’ve loved so far. It actually kind of makes you uncomfortable. But it also makes you want to flap your arms like wings. And it makes you want to hear more music that’s so oblique.
Once you start to delve into music like that, you can’t stop.
Pere Shae gave me that record. And I owe so much to him for that gesture. Nearly everything, in fact.
* He was “Pere Shae” long before he was the Deadheads’ “Poohshae”. And I’ll remember him as father, rather than bear.
Idiotic New York conventional wisdom
It’s bad enough having to hear Boomers drone on about how New York has lost its edge. These tend to be folks who rarely leave Manhattan and have almost certainly never been to, say, an illegal Todd P show in Bushwick, surrounded by naked dancers and kids doing lines in plain view. Distressingly, though, this loss-of-edge notion has gone global:
“I’d hate to see Berlin smoothed over, with no critical voices left, the way the alternative art scene has been sanitized away in New York,” said Felicitas Adler, 54, clad in a trash-art sculpture she made out of cardboard and empty plastic bottles painted black at a recent demonstration to save Tacheles.
Ms Adler, please contact me before your next visit, and I’ll show you a thriving “alternative art scene”. In Brooklyn. Which is still, last I checked, part of New York.
The World What?
My latest World Cup-themed podcast for PBS’s Need to Know is now available. Includes gratuitous clips of right-wing nutjobs bloviating about a sport they hate.
Proposed football chant for USA-England
To the tune of Frère Jacques:
Ninteen-fifty, ninteen-fifty
One-to-zip, one-to-zip
You are going home now, you are going home now
Have a nice trip! Have a nice trip!
Bonus annoyance points for Americanism “one-to-zip” sted “one-nil”.
R.I.Fucking.P.
James Luther Dickinson died a few months ago. How did I miss this? The man was a genius, and now I’ll never get to interview him.
Seriously — the man who turned two Alex Chilton records * into masterpieces died, and I didn’t even know.
“Everybody goes as far as they can, they don’t just care/
You’re a wasted face, you’re a sad-eyed laugh, you’re a holocaust”
Goddamn, Jim — rest in peace.
[UPDATE (and the asterisk ***): Plus he produced yet another masterpiece, the one that led me to the Big Star and Chilton stuff.]
Church
Fred Clark rules my world every shabbos. He’s my rebbe, for real.
Forwarded with minimal comment
From my in-box at Channel Thirteen:
From: REDACTED
Sent: Mon 6/29/2009 4:06 PM
To: Karr, Rick
Subject: The anti-MJ tribute commentary
A very much opposing view of the Michael Jackson tributes….from Republican strategist Jack Burkman…to schedule please use media contacts below:
1. The celebration of Jackson’s death — which is what the cable shows are doing — is a shocking indictment of American culture. Jackson was a drug addict, a nut, a person who tried through plastic surgery to turn himself into a transvestite, and a cross dresser. This, of course, leaves aside charges of child molestation but he was found innocent.
A transvestite … AND a crossdresser!
(more…)
Damascus Citizens’ Redemption?
Earlier this year, I got into a beef with a [misguided] group of environmentalists in rural Pennsylvania.
Long story short, while I approved of their goals, I disdained their approach, which lacked charity and empathy. Attacking their neighbors, I thought, gained nothing. Worse, it lost the all-important sympathy of those neighbors, some of whom are pretty darned cool and enlightened. The environmentalists disagreed.
All along, I’d thought that their beef wasn’t with their neighbors, many of whom had agreed to sell drilling rights on their land to gas prospectors who were going to use a dangerous technique, but rather with federal regulators (a.k.a. the Bush Administration) who’d agreed to allow said technique to go unregulated.
Finally, some lawmakers are about to introduce legislation that would regulate the technique — which is what should have happened in the first place. Here’s hoping that the bill passes, and that my environmentalist acquaintances can repair the damage they’ve done by implying that their neighbors are mendacious idiots.
For f**k’$ sake….
Does anyone really care about the threat of communism anymore?
Haven’t we moved on to another mortal foe?
Damn
Is Roy Edroso incisive, or what?
