L7, “Wargasm” (1992)
A man walks down the street
This is a great story on why Paul Simon said “You Can Call Me Al”. My parents heard it at a performance of some music by a man named Stanley Silverman:
The eclectic work refers to a road in the Hamptons, takes inspiration from the fact that New York’s classical and Latin music FM stations are next to each other on the radio dial and closes with variations on Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” (The elder Mr. Silverman, it turns out, took Pierre Boulez to the 1970 party that inspired the song, at which Mr. Simon was mistakenly called Al and his wife at the time, Peggy, was called Betty.)
The Times clips the story, but according to my parents, Boulez, who had never heard of Paul Simon, is the one who called him “Al” and his wife “Betty”.
Also too, this is open thread.
Tuesday Evening Open Thread
Gotta admit I admire Mr. Charles P. Pierce’s May Day commemoration:
There is a strong feeling, and not merely on the right or from our gloriously apathetic Center, that the Occupy people have had their time on the stage, that it is time for another show to begin. Nobody’s ready for a remix. Nobody’s ready for a reboot. (Me? I’m still trying to figure out why in hell they’re bringing back Dallas.) And nobody, certainly, is prepared to admit that what started in Zuccotti Park and a hundred other places might have permanently affected the way Americans looked at the connections between how the country does its business and how the country runs its government.
Just this morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature about how the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the activities of the lawyers who worked for the assorted shark tanks that ran the world economy into the ditch… [W]hat it does is illustrate, again, what an utterly corrupt nation the United States of America was in the first decade of the 21st century. The governing elites, all of them, were complicit in massive fraud against the rest of us. Either they participated in it, which would be the bankers and (it appears) their lawyers, or they condoned and celebrated it, which would be the financial press and the elite media, or they shirked their duty to protect the political commonwealth from being hijacked, which would be the members of both parties in the government, and us, for letting so much of the country run on automatic pilot for so long.
This was a banana republic. It was a failed state in everything except the fact that no tanks rolled in the streets. The terrorists were not hiding in Waziristan. They were having lunch at Cipriani’s and sitting in luxury boxes at the Meadowlands. The government existed only to increase their profits and to provide a quasi-legal context for organized piracy. There was an extraordinary contempt for the law, for the institutions of government, and for the people the law and those institutions were supposed to serve. The country was cored out. It was a shell of a country and a shell corporation, and it has not recovered yet…
If the Occupy people want to march, I say let them march. If they resist conventional politics, that may be because conventional politics are worth resisting. What I do know is that, if i weren’t for the people in the streets last autumn, the Obama people would be running a very different campaign and Willard Romney wouldn’t look half as ridiculous as he does. Somebody has to care enough not to care.
I like his taste in music, too. As always, YMMV.
Apart from that… anybody want to share the story of their day?
The Old World Is Rough, It’s Just Getting Rougher
For some reason I’ve run across umpteen covers of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game in the last few weeks, some of which are pretty good. That got me thinking about Isaak’s cover of Solitary Man, and how that song is almost never covered, but when it is, the covers tend to be quite good.
In other news, my politics give-a-shitter is in the shop for repairs today.
The Old World Is Rough, It’s Just Getting RougherPost + Comments (34)
Do I have to tell the story?
I just heard a weird jazz version of “Fool In the Rain” at the precious coffee shop near the undisclosed location where I am spending the semester. A few weeks ago, I sat through an excruciating dinner where someone insisted on playing “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” on YouTube on his iPhone, even though we were at a nice restaurant (it was my fault, I had mentioned that it made me sad to think that the sweet, dorky, Jamaican tourist Sting of that video had devolved into a pompous rock dinosaur suitable only for tantric monkey sex mockery). Also too, it is supposed to rain a lot today.
So…what are the best songs about rain? There’s a lot that I sort of like — “Bus Stop”, “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, “Rainy Night In Georgia”, “You Left Me Standing In the Rain” — but only one I can think of that I love, “I Wish It Would Rain”.
Levon Helm RIP
The only American member of “The Band”, dead at 71.
I’m still looking for a drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one.
A commodity to be bought and sold, like rock n’ roll
Dick Clark RIP:
Dick Clark, a television host and entrepreneur who sold rock-and-roll to Middle America on the dance show “American Bandstand” and counted down the new year with millions of TV viewers as emcee of an annual celebration in New York’s Times Square, died April 18 at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif., after a heart attack. He was 82.
[…]Mr. Clark was a millionaire by 30, describing himself as having an interest in 33 businesses, ranging from music publishers to, as the New York Times reported, an operation that made and sold a stuffed kitten for sale on “American Bandstand” called the Platter-Puss.
His other enterprises included the book “Dick Clark’s Easygoing Guide to Good Grooming” (1986) and Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Grill, his dance-show-themed restaurant.
When I watched the “Behind The Music” on Jerry Lee Lewis, I learned that Dick Clark was one of The Killer’s best friends. Not quite as surprising as learning that Wink Martindale was one of Barry White’s closest friends, but close.
I always liked Dick’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve better than the other Rockin’ New Year’s Eves.
A commodity to be bought and sold, like rock n’ rollPost + Comments (159)