Along with giving Gallagher something to doother than harangue interviewers, we seem to be including Ingrid Michaelson, who is one of those terrible results of major labels noting a growing market for Twee. And what is Aimee Mann doing there?
Well, and it's pretty clear that Lewis Black kinda got cornered on that one, and has a distinct look of 'who the fuck are you, and where's my money?' And then...Well, Daniel Baldwin. Let's just leave his name there, and think of what most quickly springs to mind.
Who would be bringing this cavalcade of...Stars-that-include-that-guy-in-the-hat to you? This guy! Craig Marquado, who you may recall has done this before, is back as the premier entertainment...Guy who is around here in the local area!
There's not a lot to be found simply by Googling this one. Just something from Craig's magazine, and more opportunities to watch that fantastic commercial.
There's some pretty awful video there...I'm not bothering linking to it, actually. (If you go look for it, make sure to include the phrase "Jay Horton" in your search.) So really, there's very little to be learned from the Internet in this case, and what little you will learn seems to be in-house coverage.
There's still no real clear picture of what exactly Craig Marquardo does. As I've said before, the niche his magazine fills is also filled by every other monthly, weekly and daily around here. I don't believe that we were crying out for a local awards show either, but here we are. There's something compulsory-feeling about this fun I'm being asked to have here.
There is also a YouTube channel (put together by someone named 'Brett's Aunt') that features longer versions of the clips you see in the initial commercial, wherein the potential presenters attempt to come up with reasons why they should be there. They reside somewhere on the border of funny, without actually crossing over. Nonetheless, you should at least go watch the Daniel Baldwin one.
"The problem is not just that these claims are preposterous but that the writers did not acknowledge they were saying things that common sense might call into question. This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one's piety." - Steven Pinker, in what was admittedly a different context
In what seems like an endless thank-you note to heavy metal, some cable station available to me keeps playing "Metal: A Headbanger's Journey"(2005), in which an earnest young Canadian fellow sort of does an okay job examining the social issues surrounding his favorite musical genre, and a great job getting interviews with the players, artistic and otherwise. The problem of a documentary made by a fan is that probably the guy is going to fail to be objective...And beyond there it turns into problems with the individual. For instance, his choice of questions.
In interviewing the lead singer of Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth, there is this hilarious sequence where the singer is asked what his chief inspiration is. Taking a long, significant drink from his enormous glass of wine, he then fixes the camera with a verrry long stare that bespeaks great gravity and scariness before simply intoning, "Satan". All previous interviewees had gamely noted that the whole Satanism thing was a metaphor at best, a salable pose at worst. Generally, they had said this with smiles on their collective face, too, as if to emphasize how obvious this fact is.
Not Gaahl (for that was his name), though, unless he's just early enough in his career to be still too concerned with the pose, and worried that seeming overly jovial about the whole thing might call his dedication into question. But after this, in an extended discussion of how black metal devotees in Scandinavia have, at times, shown their devotion to...Something, by burning down churches, Gaahl was also on record as being one hundred per cent behind this sort of activity.
Well, okay: that's pretty indefensible, but if you say so...Gaahl isn't done though. He needs to express his socio-religio basis for this view of his, and suggests in the course of a longer sentence that "the semitic roots" need to be eliminated from Western culture. And I'm screaming at the teevee, "Um, maybe you should go back and ask him to elaborate on that one a bit?" It goes well beyond the basic stupidity one may expect of your average shithead, and into fostering an atmosphere ripe for genocide, so maybe one should shed light into this area, which only happens when The Questions are asked. In this case, they weren't.
But Canadian dude's a fan, not a journalist. He even asks the question at the end that I've heard more than one fourteen year old ask in my time: Why do they demonize and ridicule us so? Um, maybe just maybe metal intentionally ghettoizes itself due to the nature of its target audience, and sort of invites demonization and ridicule? Literally naming its bands things like 'Demon' and so on? Of course, the forces of Good Via Consensus are right there to do the demonizing, playing into this stupid dynamic by simultaneously over- as well as under-explaining the whole phenomenon. As usual, it's the Music These Kids Are Listening To These Days, to say nothing of The Video Games, that is causing the problem, whereas I've always felt that the thing that led to the culture in which said music and said games are acceptable is that we live in a hyper-militarized bad dream of a nation that randomly bombs and invades other countries more or less whenever we feel like it, and we are repeatedly told that this is the just and good way of approaching life on Earth.
As always, this makes me think that people should pay me to sit around talking about things. Also, when we inevitably get around to how metal views and portrays sexuality, the discussion vis a vis homosexuality rapidly becomes hilarious. Rob Halford of Judas Priest must be discussed, and as usual there's a parade of aging English gentlemen who pronounce themselves just shocked when they found out he was gay.
Even better than this is the endless footage that suggests to me that this guy was in Heaven -as far as his professional life went- in those days. He had a massive fan base of adolescent males who adored him and wanted to be him. By that of course I mean that they wanted to be some weird idealized biker/rock star fantasy, not a leather daddy. Of course, almost all of said adolescent males were pretty damn heterosexist, and likely to miss the import of lyrics that alternately seem to be about the search for individual freedom or the thoughts of a man who spent much of his life in a country where it was literally illegal to be gay. Also, he may be a vampire.
This is all par for the course in metal. The target audience is adolescent males, again, and our documentarian makes a lot of hilarious generalizations about the need for teenaged males to come together in an atmosphere free from the confusing female influence. A sentiment of not so much misogyny as it is terror of the female runs freely through the lyric content of this genre. The ongoing suggestion that women are just out to control you, take your money, have sex with your friends and ultimately entrap you with pregnancy and responsibility (See Ronnie James Dio-era Black Sabbath's "Walk Away" for a very on-the-nose example of this) is paired with many an celebration of the salubrious effects of hangin' with the boys. It is often suggested that one should only hang with the boys.
Yeah, so Canadian metal fan (okay; his name is Sam Dunn) is too much a product of this cultural meme to understand how gay that could easily be read to be, and cheerfully celebrates the camaraderie aspect of it. In fact, the documentary ends with an extended montage of fans detailing how rock n' roll music saved their lives, over a lot of slo-mo shots of teenaged males in baggy shorts, moshing and sweating.
The whole thing is that how fucking homoerotic the entire thing is sits uncomfortably side by side with how homophobic the actual practitioners and fans are. The genre holds equal roots in glam and blues, and I think that's part of it. Glam is where the subversive desire to shock at any cost came from, and blues comes through the transmogrifying lens of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Since the early songbooks of both bands were almost entirely comprised of old blues songs -the Rolling Stones giving credit where credit was due, and Led Zeppelin pretty much never giving it, despite their first album pretty much being a Willie Dixon tribute- a certain kind of misogyny attributable to old black men comes through. On one hand, musn't generalize like that, but on another, listen to the songs in question, in the original, and come back and talk to me.
Somewhere down the road, through the mutation of decades and the generalized dumbing-down of the content, we get whiny dudes in spandex and studded leather with hair that looks like Stephanie Zimbalist's talking about how fuckin' evil women are, man...
Shit, speaking of which, I was originally going to turn this into a post about Sarah Palin and how openly vindictive she is, and how most Americans are pretty much like that, since to be endlessly angry and offended at the world is to acquire righteousness for oneself in the minds of the stupid, and how the Republicans will probably win because of that, but this has gone on too long as it is. Maybe next time.
Mixwatch '08: In Which We Finally Come To Grips With It All
Starting last summer, my "Summer Fun Mix" series ground to an abrupt halt. What last summer produced, in fact, was one made in late Spring, and promptly forgotten. It was ultimately titled "That Time Forgot", and the track list is available here.
So this summer, with the near-constant work and having to move, yet again, led to a weird one. Since I am still an analog kid, I needed first to build shelves on which to put my records, and get my stereo set up for the recording onto magnetic tape. At various points, the inclined plane, the pulley and the wheel were involved.
Then of course, there begins the endless debates with oneself about the themes involved, and how much to be that way about it, as opposed to just putting a bunch of songs together that I like. I sort of told Bee about this inner debate, and I am almost certain that what I did there was make her over-analyze lyrics in songs that I included simply because I liked them.
But if there was a theme, what was it, as far as this one goes? A traveler, sensing his travels are done for the time being; that's in there, but also the idea that maybe you -oneself- are not so good a judge anymore of what is rational and what is not. And above all else, don't violate the ultimate law of mixmaking: do not end on a dark note. I nearly did, just 'cause I was having a hard time juggling. Let's look.
"Dismal Dan"- Jack Purvis & His Orchestra. This 1930 recording sums up what I love so much about that particular period in jazz: people couldn't afford big bands anymore, and what small combos that were left had to economize to a tremendous degree. What they did instead was make a noise so damn big, you hardly noticed the lack of a Tommy Dorsey-sized outfit. They played the hell out of it.
"Blow Wind Blow"- Wilmouth Houdini. This is also from some point in the late '20's, early '30's. It's from a compilation album released last year called I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore, on some record label too cool to bother telling you what its name is, or what the provenance of any of the recordings is. They're all recent transplants to America, the people on that album, and it shows. Beautiful Ukranian weirdness sitting alongside Hawaiian music. This particular song is your basic Cajun shit-talking song, but the direness of the violin bespeaks something terrible about to happen. Tom Waits stole from it twice, by the way: the melody became "Jockey Full of Bourbon", and his own version of "Blow Wind Blow", from Frank's Wild Years, is decidedly his own, but every bit as chilling.
"Alabamy Bound"- Santo & Johnny. From the boys who brought you "Daydream". A weird attempt at Space Age Pop, Bachelor Pad Music. Too surreal to not be good.
"Deal"-Tom T. Hall. I think it is only his matter-of-fact delivery that causes people to view this man as a joke act, rather than a songwriter every bit as good as say, Willie Nelson. Oh, and the song: life considered as a game of poker. Not like we've never heard that one before, but in Tom T's hands, it's like you're hearing it from an old friend.
"Vivando"- Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks. I've got a serious soft spot in my heart for these guys. It's sort of song about being bored, but also realizing that life isn't going to be exciting all the damn time, what with the dishes to be done and all. The instrumentation is beautiful.
"Jesus Christ Was An Only Child"- Modest Mouse. The pride of Issaquah. Not a lot to say here, except that this band always did need a fiddle, and this is from one of the ten greatest albums of the '90's.
"Cool Water"- Fleetwood Mac. This is from Revenge of the Killer B's, which was the second of two compilation albums of b-sides to hit singles. Here, it's Lyndsay Buckingham leading the kids through this Sons of the Pioneers favorite. Turns out, this song is creepy as hell, and I'd never had a chance to notice it before.
"Easier (alternate version)"- Grizzly Bear. This one is from last summer's Music Issue of 'The Believer' magazine, with its accompanying CD. This song is pretty damn effecting anyway, but here, the Exceedingly Creepy Beach Boys thing they've got going on is in service of a parenthetical, understated story line, which may or may not be the lead singer channeling his dead grandfather.
"The Friendly Ranger At Clontarf Castle"- Thin Lizzy. This song, and the one before it, have always belonged together, in my mind. This is the first song they ever recorded, from 1971. It begins with a Moody Blues-esque spoken-word intro that I elide from the mixtape final cut. I'll let Phil Lynott's haiku-like poetry do the talking: To feel the goodness glowing inside to walk down the street with my arm about your hips side by side
To play with a sad-eyed child 'til it smiles to look upon a starry sky at night realize the miles
To see the sun set behind the steeple Clontarf castle, no kings or queens or knightly people
A cold mile, and it's pourin' rain to wave goodbye to a very good friend never meet again
Little thoughts ring little memories of you to me
Shit makes me cry, man.
"Ventura Highway"- America. The one good song by what may very well have been the 1970's least talented American band. But it's so damn good, it makes up for it all. Along with some truly great lines, it also features a refrain that casually mentions 'alligator lizards in the air', and a verse that includes 'purple rain' (!).
"My Tears Dry On Their Own"- Amy Winehouse. This might be the best damn pop song I've heard in ten years. Also, I don't view it -for my own needs- as a breakup song; I always saw it as a song about self-reliance in the world.
"Look Thru Any Window"- The Hollies. Might very well have been the best damn pop song of the '60's.
"Box of Rain"- The Grateful Dead. I think a lot of people forget that both American Beauty and Workingman's Dead weren't psychedelic albums so much as they were country pop of the highest order.
The last song on this side was going to be Blondie's "Union City Blue", but my vinyl of that one is too warped to play. Sitting in lieu is the magnificent, Badfinger-esque Emmit Rhodes song, "With My Face On the Floor", just 'cause I like it.
Side Two commences with the Talking Heads' immortal "Crosseyed and Painless". The magnificent paranoia at work in those kids during that period of their career is simply fuckin' piquant.
"Raisin In The Sun"- Self Fulfilling Prophecies. A wonderful, vaguely-Clash like (but not really) song from some local boys. Bee and I saw them on their last night in town before a national tour, and I've not heard from them since.
"7th Time"- Xymox. From that first, murky, weird, uncomfortable album, Clan of Xymox, in which they sort of seemed like an actual tribe of synth-playing aliens from some rainy place in the Low Countries. This is the one vaguely peppy song.
"Wolf Like Me"- TV On the Radio. I'm not even sure how to sum this one up, except that "howlin'...for-ever..." refrain at the end of this one is so nicely chilling, and absolutely right for the metaphor that I suspect is at work here.
"Born on the Floor"- The Make Up. Like pretty much everything they did, this is a song that is both deadly serious and completely satirical. It takes the lyrical conceit that the narrator was present at all the most revolutionary moments in western civilization, but was only an embryo or fetus while all of them were happening. Oddly, I could see this song being done entirely straight-faced by any number of less clever bands.
"My Posession"- The Rolling Stones. A nice one, and an odd one. It possesses one of the meaner bass lines in rock history.
"The Door Into Summer"- The Monkees. Another one that is both nice and odd. Lyrically, it's really just one of the many songs by '60's pop bands that tried to be hard hitting and critical of those who went to work in a suit, and stuff. But, this is also more or less a lyrical transcription of one of my favorite 'Twilight Zone' episodes, of the same name.
"7 and 7 is..."-Love. It just kicks ass, this song. No idea what the fairly silly-sounding lyrics are about. Doesn't matter.
"Cold Duck"- Zen Guerrilla. See directly above, although in this case, I can't even tell what the lyrics are.
"Model Worker"- Magazine. This recording is taken from the soundtrack to "Urgh! A Music War". Howard Devoto opens it by saying, "And this song is...Full of moral fiber..." I love this under-appreciated band, and this song just goes so nicely after the overwhelming power of "Cold Duck", while also changing the mood, the 'subject'.
"Polk Salad Annie"- Tom Jones. Thanks to Junk Thief for this one, as I'd never heard of it before. Mind you, Tony Joe White still does it better.
Oh hell, let's watch that again:
Okay. Well shit; more than okay.
"Somebody Like You"-Marshall Crenshaw. Another one from Revenge of the Killer B's. A fantastic, climbing guitar line with a very nice twist on the chorus: "Somebody, somebody like you/I shouldn't be expectin' too much/ from somebody like you".
"Absolute Beginners"- The Jam. One of the cutest damn songs from one of the cutest damn bands. I can't find enough space for this one, without shaving seconds from other songs. I will make it work.
The annual making of the All (something) Summer Fun Mix was interrupted, somewhat, by my entire life changing early on in the summer. The mix I'd been making has only recently resurfaced, and it has some of the uncertainty and darkness of spring in it. It has some changes to be made, but what we have so far is:
"Never Been to Spain"-Three Dog Night. This song is such a wonderful meditation on not-a-goddamn thing.
"I Was A Lover"-T.V. On The Radio. Urgent and dire. A summer song?
"I Really Should've Gone Out Last Night"-Dirty 3. This song may very well come out. It's beautiful, but a little too sad. However, this being one of the strangest fucking summers I've had in years, is that so bad?
"Run Of The Mill"-George Harrison. I love the horn section.
"Chinese Translation"-M. Ward ("See, I once was a young fool like you/afraid to do the things that I knew I had to do...")
"Parasol"-The Sea and Cake. A sad song about vacations, loss, and the end of things. Hm.
"On A Neck, On A Spit"-Grizzly Bear. What can I say? They kill me softly. They strum my life with their fingers, or something. This too, might not really be a summer song, though.
"To Beat the Devil"-Kris Kristofferson. ("If you waste your time a-talkin' to the people who don't listen to the things that you are sayin', who do you think's gonna hear? And if you should die explainin' how the things that they complain about are things they could be changin', who do you think's gonna care?": The Devil's song. And he steals it, at the end.)
"We All Make the Little Flowers Grow"-Lee Hazelwood. A lovely song. About death. Hm.
"Province"-T.V. On The Radio. Yes. A nice pep-talk, and then some. ("That love is the province...Of the brave...")
"Odds and Ends"-Bob Dylan and The Band. It makes a nice Side A closer.
"Terrible Angels"-Coco Rosie. A weary observational. Nice and casual. Just 'cause it's sunny out doesn't immediately mean you lose all your reasoning capabilities, right? Right?
"When I Go Deaf"-Low. This has been my favorite song for several months now. The artist considers how nice it will be, one day, to not give a shit about art any more. But not yet: the quiet, strummed guitar gives way to one of the loudest solos I've ever heard in my life, perhaps causing some hearing loss.
"Let the Devil In"-T.V. On The Radio. It's about how fucking stupid people are for doing heroin, but it's also a kickass song, bound to get all the kids singing along.
"You Shook Me"-Led Zeppelin. Perhaps the most hallucinatory, fucked up song of all. Completely over the top, crazy virtuosity for its own sake, eminently satisfying.
"Miss Judy's Farm"-The Faces. I have a new-found respect for this band, and young Rod Stewart because of it. This is a great song, too, mind you.
"Ways To Be Wicked"-Lone Justice. My favorite of the country-influenced L.A. punk bands of the early '80's, fronted by Maria McKee, who apparently only had one good album in her. I'm not sure this song belongs.
"All The Way to Memphis"-Mott The Hoople. Same thing as The Faces, except insert 'Ian Hunter' for 'Rod Stewart'.
"To Go Home"-M. Ward. ("Lord it's great to be alive/takes the skin right off my hide/to think I'll have to give it all up some day...") Why the hell is this song on a car commercial?
"Rest Cure"-Arthur Brown. He takes a break from being crazy on this one, sort of. It's a smooth, Four Tops-esque number, but is it a satire? He goes nuts on the chorus, too.
"Virgo Clowns"-Van Morrison. A little song about how maybe just maybe certain members of a certain astrological sign need to relax a little bit.
"Don't Bring Me Down"-The Animals. You know, it's just a very good ender, and I love The Animals, for the most part. It's not especially apropos, though.
Now, whenThe Onion's 'AV Club' was having a debate several weeks ago about what the Number One Summer Jam was, I had to say Amy Winehouse's "My Tears Dry On Their Own". It's weird how she went from being someone no one had heard of, to the voice we all gotta hear, to that sick freak that is still in heavy rotation, even though she is openly deplored by all who play her music. Sigh. She still has the finest voice out there at the moment, and this song goes on the mix, dammit.
The Believer's music issue came out, with its attendant CD. Grizzly Bear is on there, with an alternate version of "Easier". It goes on, perhaps right before that Kris song.
"One Lucky Night" by M. Ward. A song for/about gettin' laid? Check.
"Me We" by Lithops. This is a weird little electronic noise n' flute ditty from a Sonig records sampler. I like it a lot, and have no idea whether or not it fits with any of these other songs.
"Holiday" by The Kinks. Another one about vacations, albeit in this case, the delusion of one who has been admitted to The Nervous Hospital, and is kind of trying to view it in the best possible light. It goes on.
The mix's story arc will go along the lines of hesitant and doubtful, maybe a little dark but only a little bruised at first, to ever happier and happier (but never sappy, folks), probably still ending on "Don't Bring Me Down".
Now, Nathan Rabin over at The Onion's 'AV Club' (who tends to start his posts with "Hey guys," which I think is just great) has brought up a long-buried memory. That of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"-The Movie! It starred Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, among many others.
Let's see if we can't just make a You Tube thing work here for the first time ever in this here blog:
So that was it. I remember seeing it the theater, as a kid. I also recall, even then, noting that representing the character of Henry The Horse (from "For The Benefit of Mister Kite") with two unnamed extras in a horse suit on roller skates was wrong. It's about heroin! That's what the bad pop-cult interpretation book I'd just read had told me! And this movie served as the grave for many an undeserved career. Well: George Burns and Aerosmith made it out, but it took many years for Alice Cooper and Steve Martin to get back their thunder. The damn thing was cursed.
And that brings me to the subject of Paul Nicholas. He played...Um, I want to say 'Billy Shears', but that was Frampton. So...He was in the movie anyway, since he too was a big star by 1978 standards, and needed to be a part of this fantastic project. Who? Well, he was responsible for the ultimately forgotten disco hit, "Heaven On The Seventh Floor". As far as songs about raping someone in an elevator go, this one is pretty much tops. Well? I mean, far from being a song about doing a bunch of coke while laying on the cold tile on the seventh floor of an office building (the coke is a given, I suppose), it's another one of those tunes that is a story, told by a fucking idiot. He asks this girl out, she says no way would she date his coke-addled, towel boy ass, and then makes the mistake of getting in an elevator with him. It gets stuck, natch, and so therefore: we must fuck!
Happy ending, eh? In eastern Oregon, we'd just drive down a very long country road, then suddenly claim engine trouble. Matter o' fact, isn't this exactly the scenario that produces not only redneck children but porn movies as well? (Heard despite terrible audio): "Wew, since we stuh in dis el'vader, I gess we shoul' hab Sex, 'cuz..." I've seen that movie.
The song itself is document to that moment when the Seventies went from that sort of morose, claustrophobic, joyless, singer-songwritery leftover Sixties stuff to this also joyless but relentlessly peppy, flat production valued, coked-out preview of the Eighties. The many You Tube results that pop up when you're looking for "Heaven on the Seven" are telling. (Hey 'Armored Panther'; just uploading audio of the song and putting in a static shot of a compilation album intriguingly titled Radio Hits of the Seventies is not making a video.)
But even th' Panther gets cred from the commenters, who are largely glad that anything involving the song ("My first make out song!", one says) is here. It is briefly discussed how awesome all this was. But other people managed to find footage of Paul on some unnamed British show :
Curiously, there was video of "Heaven" up there yesterday, but now it's unavailable. However, the delightful "Dancing With the Captain", as you have just seen, is there, as are his other hits (?) "Grandma's Party" and "Reggae Like It Used to Be" (!). Am I the only one that's noticed that England in general just collectively became gay in the Seventies? Also, note the hyperactive backup dancers, and how openly stoned the hosts are.
This brings me, for some reason, to Joe Tex. That there is the cover of Soul Country, which I found the other day for two whole dollars, sitting on the floor of some record shop. Here, Joe is thinking deep thoughts- or not: it's hard to say. Joe Tex was, I believe, the R. Kelley of his day, since both are very talented, completely fucked up, and in both cases, it's almost impossible to tell when they're joking.
Except that in Kelley's "Trapped In the Closet", at least by the time they introduce the midget (which are stupid-person shorthand for 'automatically funny'), it's clear that he's just fucking with us. Joe, I think, never made a joke in his life.
Soul Country opens up with "I'll Never Do You Wrong"; a wonderful song musically speaking, and distracting for the weirdness of its lyrics. It resembles many another soul song in that it describes the many tortures he'd gladly put up with in lieu of doing anything that might distress You. But he gets too specific, and I think it comes back to that thing I've said before about the Tyranny of Rhyme: "I hope I slip (he hope he slip) and break my hip (and break his hip) I hope a fever blister come on my lip.
You know I love my hip (he love his hip) And I love my lip, baby, that's why I'll never do you wrong"
See what I mean? On one hand, it's a no-nonsense approach: here are some practical reasons why I will never do you wrong. But on the other hand, regardless of how one may view one's hip, can any of us be said to love it?
He has this problem, too, with starting a song with what, in other hands, would be a metaphor, then it becomes something else. In the song "What You Lookin' At?", in particular, he goes from seemingly suggesting you've done something wrong in an abstract sense (" What you lookin' at, fool? You DID it!") to noting that you've actually spilled something on the floor ("Don't just stand there: GO GET A WET RAG!"). And the song "Bad Feet". It could be a metaphor for how your character stinks so bad, it's like smelly feet. But no: it's really a song about feet. And "You Said A Bad Word"; the word could be anything. Maybe you used the word 'love' too early in the relationship, and now Joe is nervous about the extra pressure. I don't know. But far, far worse than this, instead it's a song about how you literally said a bad word, and now Joe is going to coerce you into sex, lest he tell someone what you've done. (Matter of fact, halfway through the song, he reneges on the original arrangement: "(snickering) But wait; we gotta make a different deal, cuz' that last deal done gone BYE-BYE!")
I don't know where he is these days, nor do I know where Paul Nicholas is. Again, I swear that Paul literally was working at some disco/bath house/coke den and was noticed by some advance man for Robert Stigwood. Hence, brief fame. I imagine that Joe Tex came up in that era when any black man with half a singing voice could get snatched up by Atlantic Records. Only later would they stop and notice what intensely personal demons he was working out.
This is all the stuff that we live with in our memories, and occasionally find ourselves humming while driving. It's where we came from.
And what have we been listening to, of late: The Legendary Journeys
On our turntable riiiight now in fact, it's Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. Amazing, amazing stuff. So many questions tantalizingly raised and not even sort of answered. Bee and I went n' saw 'em the other night, so suddenly in love with their asses were we, and spent a fair amount of time talking about how many bands all smooshed together this band reminded us of. For me: Luna, mixed with My Bloody Valentine, mixed with the eerier Sufjan Stevens stuff. In particular, the song "On A Neck, On A Spit", which is either the creepiest love song I've ever heard, or is something else altogether that I can't begin to fathom.
Trying to find out what the song is that they play constantly on Sirius sattelite radio that sounds like '60's soul, with a woman singing, and the refrain is just, "no...no...no..."
Next show to be seen, and amazing album still in serious rotation roundabouts here: TV On the Radio's Return To Cookie Mountain, which seems to be another one of those breakup albums I love so much. In particular the song "Province", which contains the amazing line; 'Love is the province of the brave.'
Album I am so glad to own, and am amazed more people haven't heard: The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. This album was originally given to me on a mix tape with the words 'Arthur Brown loses his shit', on it. Quite so. 1968 was a year to be ahead of one's time, especially in the 'I am a black man who has responded to the world be seeming crazy, so maybe you'll at least be amused by me, and later meditate on my lyrics'. No wonder he covers both Screamin' Jay Hawkins and James Brown ("I Got Money") here.
Still in heavy rotation: M. Ward's Post War; a beautiful, gentle meditation on...It All. "Lord it's good to be alive/takes the skin right off my hide/to think I might have to give it all up someday." Dirty 3's Whatever You Love, You Are, especially the song, "I Really Should've Gone Out Last Night". Low's The Great Destroyer, specially the song "When I Go Deaf".
Band that, it turns out, did most of those songs you loved, but never had any idea who did them: Three Dog Night!
Recently renewed appreciation for: Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast, especially the I-don't-really-think-he's-talking-about-being-gay song "The Prisoner": 'Break the walls; I'M COMIN' OUUUUT!'
Album I didn't know existed, but is great: Coltrane, by John Coltrane.
Band I can't find any recordings of in my local recorde shoppe: Tilly and the Wall. (I love them so much.)
Curious about: Bonobo
"Listening to" (i.e. reading): Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower"
I've just walked about seventy blocks in the rain, due to reasons that I don't one hundred percent feel like getting into here; besides they're irrelevent to the topic at hand, but it left me lots of time to talk to myself; one of my favorite pastimes.
Well? I mean, I've always got something interesting to say, and I always listen. You gotta apply your people skills to yourself sometimes, you know.
And I am reminded of a conversation I had recently about why otherwise nice, smart, normal people end up doing hallucinogens. It's getting into the toolbox and messing with the wiring, I said, and the person I was talking with agreed. The results, depending on the pilot, will vary. This too, along with set and setting, as Tim Leary would have it.
But it's a lot more than being in a pleasant setting, with people you like and trust, and with your mind in a positive place. That sort of thing strikes me as some weirdly corporate way of viewing your consciousness expansion: be proactive at all times, American, and you'll be just fine. No: some times it's about putting yourself in specifically difficult circumstances to see how this fine, oversized simian brain of ours reacts.
When I helped Johnson get a job at the hospital, I wondered what the hell I'd been thinking. I nonetheless walked up there on his first night, to see how he was doing. I noted that he was training with the hardest, most doctrinaire, actually runs down the hall Material Transportation Technician there was. But curiously, Johnson was smiling. "How's it going?" I asked, and he just kinda made this weird little grunting laugh noise I recognized well, and sorta bugged out his eyes at me. "You're not." I said, but he was. He had decided to take LSD for the occasion of his first night working at a hospital. Not all that long before, GNP and I had walked through there in a similar state, to get my check (and referring to ourselves as 'High Level Officials' all night long), and were overwhelmed with the sheer volume of misery present. But I gotta admire Johnson for his perceptual fortitude, and later did a lot of the same (my Dad's wedding where the Governor of Oregon is giving away the bride?[!!!]). Bradfield ...well no. Some more name-play. The Enigma? The Handsomest Head of Hair in Davenport, Iowa? The Yupperstretcher?-Naw. That one's even too much of an in-joke for this setting. Any way, Bradfield, when he was moving out here, took Amtrak and decided that being trapped on a fucking train was a salubrious set of circumstances in which to trip. While going through the Columbia Gorge, he saw (or thought he saw) an eagle swoop down out of the sky, and pluck a salmon from the river. At that point, he was glad about his new home.
And that 'thought he saw' above is important. A lot of people who don't know of which they speak will tell you that you hallucinate in these circumstances. I don't exactly agree: you don't (or rarely) see things that aren't there. You just see a great deal more of the totality of things, people and situations. This is why these drugs worked fantastically in therapeutic settings, and why-if you are of strong enough mind- you may also self-administer some therapy. And for bad or for good, you always learn something: which of course is also one of life's great lessons. After a while, you realize that there's really no difference between you on drugs and just you. It's always You, having a conversation with yourself. Or, if you believe in God, you get to meet Him, and perhaps challenge him.
So much psychedelic music (generally speaking made from the middle '60's to very early '70's, at which point it splintered into a million different directions [of course]) you would think, to hear some folk tell it, is of the peace n' love and everything somehow being All Good. Not so much. A lot of the folks who fucked with their own wiring got to see the scary part of the basement of their various minds, and decided to point it out to you, in various ways. Since you're sort of voluntarily courting insanity ("Drugs are a bet with yr mind", wrote one James Douglas Morrison), it's worth noting that you'll probably encounter some rather serious issues and questions about the world and (especially) yourself that generally you either wouldn't, or Wouldn't Let Yourself.
In this vein, let me say: it's kinda weird how Pink Floyd is such fucking depressing music, where the overarching themes are insanity and despair, and yer average American teenager will so often spend their first occasions being initiated into the Mysteries listening to it. Nonetheless, Dark Side of the Moon really is a great album to trip to, if you ignore the lyrics completely. (Ummagumma, as the name suggests, is the one you really want, if you ignore the second disc completely.) But if you really wanna head to the dark side, I always suggest:
Strictly Personal, by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, is such an extreme mind-fuck that you'd better know what you're doing, pup. It's a nightmare of over-affected flange rock and Don Van Vliet, as always, skewering the already sacred beliefs of hippies. From "Ah Feel Like Ahcid", the opening track (and one of the few moments of comic relief), it goes. Sets the mood of Yeah, I do drugs, but I'm not a fool, and songs about this least objective of activities are ridiculous. Mind you, if you're all simple minded, you'll go Heh Heh cuz' this's a song about Drugz. "Licked a stamp, saw a movie, dropped a...Stamp. Ooh, I ain't got the blues no more I said Put me thinkin' the postman's groovy..." Totally stupid, and funny as hell: sung like an old bluesman. But he's actually got a serious mission (except when he jokes again, on side two- "Beatle Bones and Smokin' Stones": the strawberry house, strawberry car, strawberry caterpillar. Strawberry Fieeeelds! Long Winged Eel Slither!). He would like to remind you exactly how susceptible to programming and bad ideas you are in this state: No Good Gurus, and even Dylan never said it this good. "Trust Us" starts after a weird noise intro, where he says, "I may be hungry/but I sure ain't weeeeeirrrrrrd..." It's a collection of easy to memorize (and easy to write) rhyming slogans. Harmless enough on the face of them, but if made into doctrine...Who knows? By the time he gets to the psychedelic flange nightmare in the middle, it's become: the path is you let the lying lie the path is you let the dying die Half-enlightened advertising slogan transmogrified into something I can kinda hear a vicious idiot like Charlie Manson saying...
And as I've said before, Free Your Mind, and Your Ass Will Follow by Funkadelic is also a broad tour of The Basement, while also being nothing less than a revolutionary document: a perceptual Declaration of Independence. But it too understands that with your new-found power to Remake Yourself and the Entire World, comes a certain amount of responsibility, and you need to not be a jackass. Furthermore, They're Black, so that adds a whole somp'thin' other to it. When it's not poking vicious (and dead-on accurate) fun at the world we seem to have found ourselves in, they're right there in your head, screaming over the noise: FREE YOUR MIND AND YOUR ASS WILL FOLLOW! THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS WITHIN! In the background, you can hear one of them saying, "I'm so confused..." Yup. Welcome aboard.
It's worth noting that at first, this category of drugs were described as psychomimetic, or compounds that imitate psychosis. Then it was hallucinogens (and I've described my problem with that one above), or things that made you hallucinate. Finally, someone (I'm gonna say Humphrey Oswald, but I'm not sure) came up with psychedelic, which just means Mind Expanding. Of course, in their way, they're all somewhat accurate. "This, like anything, is a mirror: if a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out." True. And also worth noting that Albert Hoffman, when he accidentally discovered it (right in between the Television and the Atomic Bomb. How odd.), was trying to synthesize another, better, headache remedy. What happened instead was a cure for...The Biggest Headache of All? Life, perception and the human pain associated with religion and the industrial revolution... Again, it's just too big a topic.
I generally make mixes as a seasonal thing, or as a response to trauma, as I've written before. The Summer Fun mix, in particular, is a serious rite of passage. It not only describes how I'm feeling, but how I hope the summer to go for me. As I've also written, I'm sort of starting to hate summer. It has been, as far as the last few years go, all about people leaving me, or leaving Portland anyway. My mad season is fall, by the way: it gets better and better the closer I get to my birthday. So, however belatedly, here is the track listing for Summer Mix, '06!
[ Side A,The Gentle Side] "It's You"-Animal Collective "River Theme"-Bob Dylan "Behind That Locked Door"-George Harrison "I Hear Good Night"-Low/The Dirty Three "The Only Living Boy in New York"-Simon & Garfunkel "The Sun Beats Down"-The High Llamas "Pacific Theme"-Broken Social Scene "Astral Traveling"-Pharoah Sanders "Decatur"-Sufjan Stevens "Amie"-Pure Prairie League "Story of My Life"-Loretta Lynn "I'm Not Dead"-Cool Breeze (Cool Breeze is a guy who works in the coffeeshop downstairs. His ukelele-driven tunes are happy little miracles.) "Ain't No Two Ways About It"-Ellen McIlwaine (Ms. McIlwaine is an unfairly overlooked artist from the '70's who is easily the equal of Bonnie Raitt as far as slide-guitar playing and being red-haired goes.) "Porcupine Pie"-Neil Diamond (Easily his weirdest song.)
[Side B, the Exultant one] "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?"-Culture Club "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!"-Sufjan Stevens "Did You See the Words?"-Animal Collective "A Perfect World"-Pizzicato 5 "Fire Eyed Boy"-Broken Social Scene "Guided By Wire"-Neko Case "Portland, Or."-Loretta Lynn and Jack White "Street Fightin' Man"-Rod Stewart "A Little Less Conversation"-Elvis Presley "Thank the Lord for the Night Time"-Neil Diamond "Here Comes the Summer"-The Undertones
And, due to intervening circumstances (and again, I'm starting to hate summer), it was followed up by an angry breakup mix, titled "A Fraction of the Sum". It takes its name from the Built to Spill track on here: "And you've become, yes you have become the thing you thought was dumb a fraction of the sum"
[Side A, the really angry one] "Spec Bebop"-Yo La Tengo "I Still Get Rocks Off"-Blonde Redhead "Let's Call It Love"-SleaterKinney "Carry the Zero"-Built to Spill "Wheels of Confusion"-Black Sabbath "New Amsterdam"-Elvis Costello
[Side B, or, I'm starting to get used to this] "I've Been a Long Time Leaving, But I'll Be a Long Time Gone"-Roger Miller "Deteriorata"-National Lampoon "Katie's Been Gone"-The Band "Casimir Pulaski Day"-Sufjan Stevens "Grass"-Animal Collective "Station"-Fastway "Captain Infinity"-Zen Guerrilla "Street Fightin' Man"-Elton John (from an obscure 1970 live album; it's great) "Run Runaway"-Slade "The Purple Bottle"-Animal Collective "Afro"-Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
So let's see. Stats? Number of Rolling Stones songs done by other artists: Two Number of included Animal Collective Songs, suggesting that I just might have a favorite band or something: Four, beating Sufjan Stevens by a margin of One point. Songs that Everyone can sing along to: Three; "Amie", "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" and "Honky Tonk Women" Song that Everyone will Eventually learn to sing along to: "Run Runaway" Songs by Japanese people: Two Degree of Roger Miller inclusion: 1/42
There y'go. I'm going to be doing another posting on "House of Cheer" today, but it isn't, as of this moment, finished. Go check it.
Loretta Lynn's latest, "Van Lear Rose", is my thing. Jack White is on the case, as we all have heard, for the song, 'Portland Oregon', which while a great song, could really be about anywhere. Sufjan Stevens' "Illinois" (or as the entire title really goes, "Sufjan Stevens Invites You to Come on Feel the Illinoise") is in almost constant play on my kitchen boombox whilst doin' th' dish. My conflicted feelings about this in a post to come. As I write this, I am listening to Caroliner's "Rise of the Common Woodpile", perhaps the greatest (if most obscure) album about the American Nightmare ever made, from a curiously 1860's perspective. Mouse On Mars' "Glam" fills many of my days. More nice German subliminala, which I can share with so few people: it is both the soundtrack of the voice in your head, and also the dreams of machines. And finally, the mix for last fall, as revealed here, "what the water wants": "Ohio"-Coco Rosie "Claxxon's Lament"-Wolf Parade "Sister"-Sufjan Stevens "End of Music"-Do Make Say Think "It's All Around You"-Tortoise "Magic Step"-Sam Prekop "24/7 (Shoreline)"-Broken Social Scene "Jacknuggeted"-Manitoba "Antennas to Heaven"-...godspeed you black emperor! "Rococo"-Cocteau Twins (side two, for you old-schoolers like myself, ) "Obscured By Clouds"-Pink Floyd "Waterfalls"-Mt. Eerie (I don't know the name of this song by)-Sufjan Stevens "Decora"-Spoon "This Ain't the Summer of Love"-Blue Oyster Cult "Introduction"-The Delta 72 "Mississippi Delta"-Bobbie Gentry "Brace and Break"-The Thermals "Safe European Home"-The Clash "Please Don't Touch"-Motorhead "Windsurf Nation"-Broken Social Scene "Prospect Hummer"-Animal Collective "Some More"-Funkadelic "Cause=Time"-Broken Social Scene
Sometime real soon like, I shall start a secondary blog entirely about music, since not everybody wants to read about it all the time, and besides, once I figure out how to upload all this shit, I can be on Hype Machine, as is My Old Kentucky Blog, which I recommend. (Good Lord. Now I'm listening to Caroliner's "I'm Armed With Quarts of Blood", which is already an exceedingly unpleasant album in all the right ways, without the-perhaps record-breaking-four bands of looped noise that proceed even the first song. The first song begins with banjo and the shrill-est screaming you've ever heard in your life. I gotta go check what the World Wide Infranet has to say about this combo, though they never released anything on anything other than vinyl, and once recorded an entire album ["Rings On the Awkward Shadow"] on an Edison-era wire spool, which still had 1890's recordings on it, wandering through like ghosts.) Matter of fact, Caroliner gets its very own posting very soon, too. They are certainly the most unique thing to ever emerge from the American rock scene, and perhaps from the world community of music, as well. And what have the rest of you nice people been listening to, of late?
The last few years have been rough, to put it lightly. The decline of indicator species on the planet has mirrored the decline of indicatory good things in my life, and the world stage itself seems to be entirely run by nutjobs hardly unparalelled in history, but unique as far as my lifetime goes. What we need is a song. There is a song written by one Steven Morrisey, of the band The Smiths, circa 1988 or so, that is entirely comprised of a monologue about the primary role songs play in our lives: "But don't forget the songs that made you cry/and the ones that saved your life/yes you're older now/and you're a clever swine/but they were the only ones that ever stood by you." Quite so. I once attempted to make a list of the songs that saved my life, but I'm not going to keep on with the list-mania that has sort of ruled my posts of late. I was just listening to Nick Cave's "The Lyre of Orpheus" album a little bit ago, while doing the dishes. Good old Orpheus is all too familiar to we who have spent too much of their lives reading mythology, and artists all over western civ. are fond of invoking his name when they are in the mood to maunder about being An Artist. Something big must have happened to old Nick in the last few years; either he fell in love, or he found God, or both. Most of the songs on that album (and its sister album, "Abbatoir Blues") are addressed to either the love of his life, or God, the way many of the best love songs are: you can't tell. There's one on there where he says: "Everything is collapsing babe/all moral sense has gone/it's just history repeating itself/and babe, you turn me on." I love what he's doing there: apocalypse! Apocalypse! But it's always been this way, and-heeeyyy... At this moment, I'm listening to "You Forgot It In People", by Broken Social Scene. The song playing right now is 'Looks Just Like The Sun', which is an imperfect piece, left with its guts and struts showing: you can hear a door close in the background at one point, and someone is saying, "Keep going. On one...two..." You get to see inside their heads as they make this statement about how there is the beauty, and it is sometimes a lie, but sometimes the lie is all that keeps us going. It is the prerogative of fools and children to point out that the emperor ain't currently wearing anything: the rest of us came to that conclusion a long time ago. As I've said too many times: the one thing I can think of that all religions (and all those who are not religious) have in common is the notion that this world we inhabit is incurably fucked and evil. Nonetheless, that isn't a reason not to try, as I think most of the above-mentioned ultimately decide. And don't forget: people are flawed vessels, yes, but they're capable of things that are pure magic, and are holy, in the highest sense. The title "You Forgot It In People" is a warning, and a reminder. Don't forget. The song that springs to mind right now (and there's way too many of them, but...) is "These Days", by R.E.M. It was released back in the early '80's, when the activist consciousness was reawakening, after slumbering for much of the '70's. We looked around, noticed that there were still many battles to be fought: demons only sleep. I nearly suggested to Howard Dean last summer that he needed to adopt this song as his anthem (much as Bill Clinton adopted "Don't Stop (Dreaming About Tomorrow)" by Fleetwood Mac, a shrewd choice by a shrewd man). This was when a large number of us realized that the Clinton legacy was all lies and smoke, and the last thing we needed was another Democrat who claimed he was a centrist, then turned around and did everything the Republicans had been wanting to do for twelve years (welfare 'reform', the 'Defense of Marriage' act, NAFTA, the mishandling of a national health plan, etc.). We knew that Al Gore was a hideously bad choice, and Kerry couldn't get elected dogcatcher in a county entirely populated by cats, and anyway... Well, the chorus goes like this: "By accepting nature's burden (I think that's what it says), we are young despite the years. We are concerned. We are young, despite the times." Funny thing is, "nature's burden" to one side, like all great art, it says the same thing to all people, regardless of ideology. If you knock out the part about nature and put in 'God', you've got something evangelicals everywhere could sing. It appeals to liberals too, in that it suggests the eternal youth at least espoused by the remains of the '60's movement. Ahh, but old Howard got done in by the Democratic Leadership Council, and the media. I dunno. Maybe I'll get my way and Bill Richardson will run, and I'll tell him to use the song. Oh hey-the best epitaph for Peter Jennings that I've seen yet is this one, tacked on to the end of 'The Daily Show' the other evening: Jon Stewart and Peter Jennings are seated side by side, both reading Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. Jennings says, "I mean, it's impolite to laugh, but..." Stewart says, "It's like it was written by a little kid!" I laughed out loud; something I rarely do.
Farther Along, or the Importance of the Liturgical as of Use to the Secular, In the Unending War Against the Chuckleheads
"As for the human case, the generation of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire-so significant to those involved-are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time, or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope." That's Gore Vidal up there. Inspiring words are hard to come by, and it's even harder if you've taken away the Appeal to the Almighty. The language of religion comes ready made to sound a bit bigger, taller, stronger. It speaks of the primeval and puts a face on it, and don't discount that almost everything sounds cooler in a dead language. That's why most of your freedom movements of the past have been religious in origin-you've already got a Higher Principle that you, in theory, serve, and already have songs to sing, words to quote. It always gets a little thick, too, as an the eye of the historian considers it, watching both sides claim that Gawd Itself is on their side. If one were a little too literal, one might get the headache: Segregation is the will of God/God frowns on the subjugation of his people...And that's only one example. Anyway, I said a few posts back that my favorite song of them all is The Carter Family's "In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain". It's true. It's not exactly a hymn, though The Flood is mentioned, as the source of all waters. That strikes me as beautiful imagery, and that song is just odd anyway, since springs and trees and birds are spoken of as loving and sharing the same songs as people: an oddly pagan notion to come out of a staunchly conservative 1930's Christian woman from the South (for the exact opposite of this song, check out their just-plain-evil "Hold to the Right"). The other, somewhat more important thing about this song is that it has that intangible moment-out-of-time quality that all really great music has for me. You have been taken outside the boundaries for a moment, to receive A Gift, and A Lesson. Then I started looking at the list, if there was one, and noting that there's actually a lot of at least gospel-esque material in there. "Uncloudy Day" by the Staple Singers: gospel, and nothing but. Or-well, only your ethnomusicologist types will come out and actually say this, but...There's a lot of sexual energy in gospel. In fact, this is one of the sexiest damn songs I've ever heard. Its circular structure, insistent, throbbing tempo, dreaming twangy gui-tar...It makes me forget that as usual, it's a song promising you that one day, there'll be more than just a grave waiting for you, at the end of this life. And one of my favorite melodies is "Hold To the Unchanging Hand of God", as done by Ry Cooder. The words aren't bad either, but I do like them better when Janis Joplin stole the melody to make it into "Mercedes Benz". They work because they're bigger than what they are. There's plenty of songs about God, and about heaven, and plenty about hell, certainly. Lots and lots about Jesus (Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" being the best, I feel), lots and lots about the Devil. These ones work because they are universal in scope. God as The Great and Venerable Mechanism of the Universe, or Justice, or Fate. The Devil as the Combine, or The Bullshit Engine (my term for it), or The Exact Opposite (my other term for it), or the military/industrial complex: when Uncle Tupelo sings "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down", I'm certainly not envisioning a guy with cloven hooves. I'm seeing the friendliest guy in a suit to come this way in a while, and he says Exactly What Everyone Wants to Hear. When Mississippi John Hurt sings "Farther along/ we will understand why/ cheer up my bro-ther/ live in the sunshine/ we'll understand it/ all by and by"...He's talking about one day seeing heaven. Like the Staples were up above. Black? Miserable? Enslaved? Nothing at all you can do about it? Believe you on the pie in the sky, and do nothing here about it. But flash forward: the song becomes an anthem of the civil rights movement without changing a single word. Magic, and bigger than religion. So it's time again, I feel, to use the tools of the...Oh look, do I even need to come right out and say it? Right after WWII, America basically found itself in charge of the world, or so it felt it needed to be. If it had chosen not to police the globe, frankly, I imagine this world would have been far better off (ah-ah-don't say it: the Soviet never had a chance). Since it chose to do so, it at least could have chosen to be a decent and wise steward with this rather fragile gift, the world. But no. Instead, we went about being every bit as rotten and deserving of scorn as every empire before it, causing much of the world to despise us, and not without reason. Now it's not even an empire. It's an oligarchy that is rapidly going broke. (And an oligarchy without money is called?...) It is having some rather nasty tantrums and spasming at its end, and threatens to take a lot of Earth with it. Those of us left to fight the bullshit engine this time are badly outnumbered, largely by apathy, and those who oppose are well funded and very, very On Point. So, all a person can really do is win the metaphorical war. Take back the tools of Bullshit from its host Engine, make it the marching tunes of a happy, bloodless revolution, where the enemy dies from ridicule. Until the next time this happens, of course. Every twenty years or so, it does. Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down.
Who would be bringing this cavalcade of...Stars-that-include-that-guy-in-the-hat to you?
Who would be bringing this cavalcade of...Stars-that-include-that-guy-in-the-hat to you?
