You know I really don't care and I don't, but I gotta start this post off SOMEHOW. Here it is (with gritted teeth)....I hope you all had a fine and dandy holiday this past Thursday! I managed to pull myself away from the Fangsgivin' table at the soup kitchen restaurant without gettin' that overly bloated feeling and for that I am surprisingly proud. Hope you gravitationally challenged BLOG TO COMM readers are now filled with good cheer and that late-Autumn lovey-dovey feeling, and if so goodie good good. But now it's time to get back to the raw meat and potatoes of existence and most of all to the matter of hand, mainly MUSIC.
***Other things besides such fine necessities as unbridled sound are keeping me occupied these days. For one, the string of comments I've been getting from MoeLarryandJesus regarding my OWN THE WHOLE WORLD review post are keeping me on my tootsies and boy do I find it all oh so wonderfully exhilarating even if this guy seems content to spurt out the same old "Chris is bad" tropes I hadda endure ever since the rise of the New and Improved Radical Left in the late-eighties practically made me tilt full 1488 (almost---I still welcome all men of good will and even different ethnicities and racial backgrounds into my ever-growing cult of personality!). Oddly enough I'm not angry at MoeLarryandJesus despite his rather neo-communist views regarding life and myself for that matter. Not even for his usual little digs and personal put downs, though I dunno if I should take his comment that I look like Julius Streicher of DER STURMER fame as an insult since well...Streicher was a kinda good lookin' guy. Maybe I should replace the CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION COMPANY pic on the left with his since that one is getting a little old 'n all and if so, thanks for the idea MLJ!
If I wanted complacency and harmony in life I woulda joined a quilting bee and really, I can get A WHOLE LOTTA pleasure outta it all even if MLJ has to resort to every worn out attack and insists on going around in circles ("Lincoln was good"..."No he was BAD!"..."No he was GOOD you neo-confederate racist you!"...) especially regarding these subjects that had nada to do with the post at hand. I'm also glad that there's some action happening around here and that my review really did jolt someone into full-fledged pangs of abject anger which is sadly in short supply these days. I mean, what else could I have been put on earth for other'n to defend myself (and life in that positive, fulfilling way) against the usual canned left wing namecalling which sometimes has me resorting to my own kinda hackneyed talk (hey, I can't be bright ALL the time, especially late at night after a long day at the salt mines). In all, the conversation we are having reminds me of that old NATIONAL LAMPOON Dave Berg spoof where his Roger Kaputnick character puzzledly looks on while a hippie and a hardhat are popping off all the right and proper New Left/Silent Majority talking points and rallying cries. But who knows, maybe some day it will all come to an end and I'll have to find another way to offend the easily insulted types who feel they have that innate right to insult people they loathe and not feel the pain of punishment they being so anointed and all!
Frankly I haven't had so much fun since I mixed cayenne pepper in with some classmate's KY Jelly!
***CURRENT READING FAVORITE!: R. Meltzer's "Lumpy Tomahawk Article" in US, THE PAPERBACK MAGAZINE #3 (Bantam Books, 1970) in which Our Hero discusses what was, is and shall remain one of the funnier television programs ever, none other than ABBOTT AND COSTELLO. The real kicker to this boffo piece is that Meltzer wrote and laid the whole thing out like one of those TV GUIDE spoofs you used to see in MAD, only this one is called TZ GLIDE and features Meltzer's essay on the famed series as a number of random program listings that you have to follow by reading another listing on another channel at another time, making the piece practically impossible to follow! Meltzer also gives us some personal reflections on CAPTAIN SCARLET and JUNGLE JIM so when you end up reading the next part of the A&C saga your eyes can't help but suddenly shift over to another unrelated subject making the entire shebang a mishmosh laff riot! Sorta like Smegma for the eyes.
***Anyway that music's been spinnin' 'round here non-stop (you should be here at 4 AM!) and I've been boppin' and droppin' while playin' the followin' platters which I kinda get the feelin' you'll have some affectation for as Norm Crosby mighta said. No matter how down and out bloozey one can get, the right sounds for the right frame of insanity really does help one make it through the night if not through the leather restraints, and as you might have guessed thanks be to Bill, Paul and Feeding Tube for the free offerings which really do keep this blog rollin' like an elephant turd down a steep hill. OK I have a weird fixation for bodily secretions...so did Moe Howard so I guess that puts me in GOOD COMPANY!
Liz plays nothing but keyboards here but you would never know it the way these tinkling sounds come off like ancient music boxes that went out of tune around 1915. Some of this, especially the waltz time music, reminds me of the kind of tracks old moom pitcher vendors stick on their ancient animation releases which does fit in its own charming Victorian way. Others sound like the exact same music as heard by a 110-year-old viewing said films while having a stroke. It sucks you in then chews you up with the tinkling and tintinnabulations that are usually associated with percussion instruments, but it looks as if electronics did 'em all one better. Hype notes sure have me searchin' out Gary Burton's A GENUINE TONG FUNERAL which I guess had a huge influence on Durette's music, and for years I always thought of Burton as one of those foofy fusion guys who I couldn't care about in the least!
***
Paul Morley's article on Eno in the only issue of his OUT THERE fanzine had be digging back into my collection of Obscure Records, this one an item that I never did get around to hearing probably because of those olde tymey stiff import prices and all. Or perhaps because I just don't remember seeing this one in the racks anywhere way back when,
It ain't exactly the original (the John Adams track was taken off and another Gavin Bryars one added on) but it sounds just like what you'd expect the mid-twentieth century English experimental music made by the variety of improvisers, composers and phony intellectual hanger ons to sound like. It's kick your feet up entertaining and not as far-fetched in the abstract department as one would surmise, what with "Aran" sounding almost rock music and Bryars' "1,2, 1-2-3-4" keeping itself together even though the musicians were listening to what they were to be playing via headphones. The reed organ duo reminds me of Nico while overdosing and the four guitar track will make you go crazy, in a happy way of course. Might contain the very last Cornelius Cardew performance before he went totally Mao. Unlike most of the dilettante precocious art that has been made o'er the past few decades, this thing actually has enough gristle to hold it together.
***
I reallyreallyREALLY do enjoy these late-fifties Southern rockabilly tracks featuring unknowns who were lucky enough to get their brief day in the sunshine before getting stuffed in some attic along with old roadmaps and NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICs. Only this disque's got some early sides from people who actually made it big as time rolled on like Tommy Roe, Joe South and of course ol' helmet hair himself Wayne Cochran! Yes, along with music created by the usual bright hopes that fizzled out way too soon you get to hear things like an early verson of "Sheila" done long before Roe knew what banged hair was. In all this is spiffy hotcha Dixie music as it was meant to sound like during a period in Amerigan history when everything seemed to be aligned in the right, proper, perfect fashion, especially if you were a hungry suburban slob kid with plenty of resources to soothe that inner turmoil I'm sure many kids are saddled with these days!
***
The merging of early-seventies Marin County front porch harmonies with early-eighties new psychedelia a la Green on Red etc. doesn't seem exactly like the kind of match I would stand in line to hear. However this group does pull it off without being too cloyingly cute and custom made for gals who seemed to go directly not from bobbysocks to stockings, but Barbie dolls to IUDs. At least some discernible moments of melody and beat merged into a toe tapping reaction do occur, but no matter how much I twist and turn my listening parameters around there's nothing here that will ever bring me back to ORB WEAVER.
***
I used to go whole hog for these brief yet nerve racking punk rock growlers back inna mid-eighties. But that was about the time that punk really was starting to turn into punque and the whole idiom (or at least the more politicized portion of it) was nothing more than hippie love jams mark two. It's a good 'nuff effort anyway, one that really brings back the days of what raw ineptitude and totally brazen doofusness mixed with a rudimentary idea of how one should handle their instruments could mean in the face of eighties blanditude. And this thing came out in 1980, long before such atonal whiz was part and parcel of the entire punk reason for existing in the first place!
***
I'm surprised that there's a nineteenth volume of CORNFLAKE ZOO out because frankly, I didn't know that there were that many obscure late-sixties English/Europeon pop platters extant to have filled up so many albums! Most all of this really doesn't flib my jib given that this is mostly well or over-produced and fly spec-less pop rock that somehow misses the mark, but that doesn't mean there are a few moments here that do wile their way into the core of my inner being or something even cornier than that.
Most interesting track here (at least considering how it fit into my own strain of existence) is the Hep Star's cover of the Association's "Enter The Young". The reason for this is well...there was one sunny Sunday morning in the seventies when I decided to plunk AND THEN---ALONG COMES THE ASSOCIATION on the ol' Victrola, and while "Enter the Young" was playing my older cousin who was elsewhere in the abode's ears started to perk up. Y'see, while in high school she and others were responsible for slapping some new student indoctrination slide show together under the auspices of an English teacher who I really LOATHED (and continue to). Anyway my cousin remarked about how this teacher (who I think butters her bread on both sides) thought "Enter the Young" was such a bright, spirited and motivational song along with all the rest of that rather nauseating sixties humanist bullshit that I really was beginning to hate at the time, and considering how this teacher was the bane of my existence during my high stool years you can bet the NEXT LOGICAL THING I did after being told how much she liked "Enter The Young" was to SELL all my Association albums which I did! An extreme reaction true but given the situation what else could I do? Now I really like the Association and all, but after what I went through I just couldn't stand to hear 'em for a LOOOOONG while!
***
Various Artists-NEW THING SILVER LINING CD-r burn (Bill Shute)A "standard" Bill Shute burn which means that this thing is way more varied, more entertaining and definitely more musically conscious in a historical way than anything YOU'D send me! Gotta say that most of the acts found here are totally unknown to me but that don't mean they're doofus in any wayshapeform....in fact I wouldn't mind hearing more from the likes of the Jaybirds or the Kampus Kids if there is any!
Naturally Bill hadda stick some Rodd Keith song poems on which are always an inwardly-twisted hoot, and Kitty North's Olde Tymey Country has more of a meaning for him than they do this suburban slob, but I'd rather listen to music like this than I would the usual smug and complacent amerunderindie material that most of you reg'lar readers creem jeenz over because it somehow fits your own personally one-dimensional existence. And so ends my screed for National Brotherhood and Let's All Get Along Week.
***Just a friendly reminder that issues of BLACK TO COMM are still available and at costs I'm sure you can afford even if you do have to report to the unemployment office to get your moolah. Well, remember that the next reminder won't be so friendly if you value your own sense of rockist pride.
9 comments:
1. Streicher was an ugly little toad man. Don't go toad.
2. You brought up Lincoln. And Lee. Not me.
3. That K-Y story isn't true. I don't believe you'd set yourself up for a 4 hour ass-burn like that.
I hope this does not develop into another back-and-forth but...
1. Streicher sure looked better than most of the guys in the Politburo.
2. Lincoln and Lee got brought up thanks to yuor dismissal of Trump's "good people on both sides" comment.
3. ....................cute....................
I'm quite sure Lincoln and Lee weren't in Charlottesville.
Like I said, you brought them up.
Nazis in general were funny-looking bastards. Still are, mostly.
I was fortunate enough to see No Exit perform at The Smilin'Buddha in Vancouver backing DOA in '79 just prior to their lp being released..Vancouver/Victoria had some fabulous punk (and pop) bands back when I was a teen.. good times!
(((R Meltzer)))
Wouldjoo like a seltzuh, Miss-tuh Meltzuh? Send a salami to your boy in the army!
Stiggy an' Meltzer, up in a tree, kay eye ess ess eye enn GEE WHIZ!
You're entitled to your views, Christopher, as is MLJ. Isn't it ironic though that it's the left pushing thought control and intolerance these days?
(see Evergreen)
My personal journey through middle age is leading me further towards your side of the argument than MLJ's since 2014/16.
So its Scottish Independence over the United Kingdom (a life long commitment!) & Brexit over the EU, and Trump over Hillary (I'd sooner have had Sanders on the Democratic Party ticket though). These choices seem so blindingly obvious to me in many respects - For starters, Clinton would have had us all knee deep in Syria (risking a conflagration with Russia), Iran, Venezuala, North Korea, etc.
If I lived in England I'd have to vote for Corbyn over Johnson - despite their Brexit betrayal, I cannot risk the possibility of ending up with a health system similar to your own.
Living in Scotland, I'll take the SNP over them all next week, despite their anti-Brexit and insane mysoginistic and anti-Science Transgender Rights / Self-Sexual-Identification stance. It's gonna be one battle at a time from now on!
Intolerance, Chuck? I'm fairly sure that Heather Heyer did not enjoy the sort of tolerance that Chris's beloved brownshirts are pushing these days.
Only the most ignorant sort of nitwit genuinely believes Clinton would have had us at war with North Fucking Korea. That's one hornet's nest no one wants to touch, even if Trump wants Kim to join his Boys With Human Toys Club. And Venezuela? No one on the so-called left in the US gives a rat's ass about it. It's just a slogan the right uses to show the dangers of trying to feed and educate poor kids.
As a 1st generation Irish-American I'm sorry you and your fellow modern hootmons never had the stones to kick the British out. And you never will, since you're not even willing to give up your health care in order to make the break. James Connolly would piss on your big pile of kilts.
Unlike you, I didn't approve of ANY violence in my post. Antifa are a bunch of jerks, as were the "jews will not replace us" Nazis at Charlotteville. Gimme free speech!
As for Venezuala, it's got the largest oil reserves in the World, dumbo, that makes it highly attractive to either Republican or Democratic administrations.
North Korea? Who knows how Hildog would have handled it? I do know she's a fucking incompetent. Look at how she handled the shithole that is post-liberatiin, post-Gadaffi Libya. But hey, "what difference does it make now?"
Where do you stand on the pronoun laws in Canada? Or the identity politics / white guilt agenda being pushed by the left at Evergreen State College and elsewhere? Do you agree with deplatforming speakers who deviate from the accepted doctrine? Do you stand with fanatics like Naima Lowe and Chanty "Big Red" Binx? Do you agree with attacking people for wearing MAGA hats?
I don't think you quite grasp the situation here in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We have a UK Govt in London and a devolved Parliament here in Edinburgh. Some powers are reserved to Westminster, and others are devolved to Holyhrood.
This includes health. However, as part of the UK, Scotland would also be affected if the USA was allowed access to our NHS, as part of any trade deal with Trump.
That's why I said IF I lived in England, I'd vote Labour to prioritise protecting the NHS, over my fervent wish to see the UK leave the EU.
Scotland would not lose its NHS in an independence scenario, in fact it's future would be a lot safer, and I voted in favour of Independence in the 2014 referendum.
As for James Connolly, I passed his birthplace in the Cowgate, Edinburgh last week on my way to see the astounding Imperial Wax. I never pass that spot without thinking of the guy and (metaphorically) saluting his great words and deeds.
I wouldn't have died for Ireland like him, but he was an International Socialist, unlike me. Die for Scotland, maybe, but I'd rather live. Ironically, its these Int Soc guys (like the otherwise perceptive George Galloway) who oppose Scottish Independence now, claiming we'd be leaving our English brothers and Sisters behind!
Fuck that line of thinking, England has decided how we are governed since the Act of Union (or hostile takeover) was enacted in 1707!
If we want to make our situation better, we are going to have to take that power into our own hands. And soon.
Nice talkin' wit cha!
"Improviser" is a fancy term for "cannot play their instrument."
(((Phony intellectual hangers-on)))
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