78s

Read this article about Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoolie Records and the Down Home Music record store.

A few notes. I have been to Down Home Music a number of times, though I think I've only purchased records there on a couple of occasions, and one of those times I returned it for a refund as it was an electronically enhanced stereo version of a monaural LP. The other time I purchased a Lightning Hopkins album on Arhoolie Records label, and I remember it being quite terrible.

Chris Strachwitz is, as the article points out, a folklorist who records and preserves folklore. He hasn't been a commercial record producer, as my Lightning Hopkins LP clearly demonstrated. He caught up with Lightning in Houston some years after the bluesman's commercial successes, when he was a down and out alcoholic (as far as I know.) And so, a commercial blues artist on the way down became a folkloric curiosity, which points to certain paradoxes of Strachwitz' work. (There is no avoiding commercialism of popular music, for one.)

I believe that his (Strachwitz') best work as a record producer showed in the recordings and popularization of Clifton Chenier, the self-styled King of Zydeco. He's also preserved some Mexican folk music from Texas, as well as polka bands from the same state, which at one time had large centers of Polish, Czech and German immigrant communities.

Another reason why I seldom bought records at Down Home Music, is that they've always sold them at the highly inflated suggested list prices, that no other record store in the area would set.

Strachwitz, who, the article points out, has never been interested in making a fortune, and lost money on many releases, hit pay dirt a few years ago when country artist Alan Jackson recorded a song and issued it as a single, to which Strachwitz held rights, Mercury Blues, by an obscure blues artist K.C. Douglas. Then, even better, Ford Motor Company picked up the song (Mercury was in the song a minor and nearly forgotten Ford automobile brand), and used it for television and radio commercials, not for Mercury cars, but for Ford trucks. It was a fine rocking record (Jackson's). Here are some lyrics:

Well if I had money
Tell you what I'd do
I'd go downtown and buy a Mercury or two
Crazy bout a Mercury
Lord I'm crazy 'bout a Mercury
I'm gonna buy me a Mercury
And cruise it up and down the road

Well the girl I love
I stole her from a friend
He got lucky, stole her back again
She heard he had a Mercury
Lord she's crazy bout a Mercury
I'm gonna buy me a Mercury
And cruise it up and down the road

In any event, Chris Strachwitz is an admirable figure, a man, who, as the article emphasizes, has been able to live and work the life he chose without compromises. And in the music business that is extremely rare.

Cycling

One of the rituals of the new religion, and religion it is, don't kid yourself, is of course recycling. Not cycling, as I mistyped, thinking perhaps of the album Tour de France by Kraftwerk, but recycling. Everyone must do it and we all do it. Like people in poor countries where every empty bottle is treasured and reused. Pretty soon we'll be making musical instruments out of empty oil drums and cardboard boxes. The Chinese don't do it but the Americans must. Admit that you don't recycle, and soon you'll find yourself without friends, even penalized at work, perhaps.

The holy ritual is well organized, as befits a mature church. The city provides us with blue plastic boxes, whose manufacture, everyone conveniently forgets, must have contributed to the hellish global warming, boxes in which to place the sorted recyclables, bottles, cans, cardboard, whatever else is considered recyclable, before placing them at the curb on the weekly garbage pickup day. Newspapers are to be bundled and tied and placed on the sidewalk. A truck with the driver sitting on the right hand side arrives, stops at every house on the block, and collects these items, emptying the blue boxes into large bins in the back.

But. Ah, yes. But before the truck gets there on the garbage pickup day, or sometimes the next day, the private individual recyclers arrive at night and collect some or all of your recyclables. These private recyclers are most often the homeless pushing noisy shopping carts overflowing with large plastic garbage bags filled with bottles and crushed cans. Or they are Chinese or in any case Southest Asian grandmothers driving up in four door sedans of recent make and filling their trunks with the recyclables. The private recyclers take their loot to a recycling center and sell it for some small amounts of money. No one seems to mind them, except the city, but the city won't do anything to stop them. (Their collecting activities are illegal, by the way.)

Another recycling activity has been in the news lately. There are many free newspapers and magazines available from street corner boxes. Some are newsweeklies with a hysterically leftist bent, others advertising bulletins,, yet others thick New Age magazines filled with ads from psychics and healers, and announcements of various classes in New Age rituals, faiths and exercises, that are all guaranteed to make you happy at last. (This last topic is a category in itself, and one of these days, I'll bring you a review of New Age press.)

Well, the free newspapers have been disappearing from the boxes around town. The publishers have been alarmed, complaining to the authorities, their advertisers, including the New Age healers, an unhappy lot. What happened? Unlike during the last mayoral election, when the candidate of the Left picked up and threw away a newspaper with an editorial opposing him, and got away with it, this time it was the recyclers. But not the grandmas and not the homeless, for whom stealing free newspapers would not pay, but people with pickup trucks driving around town, emptying the free newspaper boxes and transporting their loot a a recycling center where they'd get, guess how much for it. Gasoline costs about three and a half dollars a gallon these days, how much would these thieves be getting for the newsprint to make it worthwhile? They get all of six American cents per one pound of paper! Now, of course, the recycling centers, like the stolen car chopping garages, deny that they would ever accept tainted merchandise, in this case, newspapers with the current date on the front page. And so it goes with recycling, not cycling.

Quiet car

Matthew Kaminski is an American journalist living in Paris, where he works as the editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe's editorial page. (Nice gig, isn't it.) During the Holidays, he and his family visited the United States and rode an Amtrak train. He describes his experience in the article which appeared in the Stateside Journal on Friday January 11, 2008, which I link at the end of this post. Here are some of my favorite quotes from it:

In this young century, we've launched a crusade, instituting all sorts of rules, in the name of making everyone happy and healthy. [...] With the proliferation of fiats intended to make people act more considerately toward one another, we've seen public civility steadily erode. [...] never before have so many different kinds of people felt empowered to demand special privileges for themselves that in some way infringe on another person's habits, good or bad.

A friend with a philosophical bent notes that as civility retreats into competing claims of entitlement, the "invisible hand" of courtesy and sympathy is replaced by the soft despotism of the state. Someone has to settle the disputes over various rights. Inevitably, that's the government (or Amtrak). "It's a bit like kids fighting," he emailed. "If they can work it out themselves, they're probably both better off. Once they go to daddy or mommy for a ruling, somebody's going to lose." I'd like to think my children would (quietly) agree.

Read the whole thing while it's available. Here's the link.

Benches to sit on

In European city parks, some of which are hundreds of years old, you'll find rows of long benches on which to sit, relax, read a book, chat, observe, feed the pigeons. Not so in the land of the free and busy. The large shoreline park in my town was built on a former garbage dump (some of my own refuse is buried there, I have to say proudly! If I could only dig up my old transistor radio from there. They don't make them like they used to), and consists of three medium size hills. overgrown with weeds, a few maintained lawns, paved paths and unpaved trails. A mile long path circles around the outside edge of the park, and many people go there to walk, run, ride rollerblades, bicycles, walk their dogs. There are maybe half a dozen short, three person benches on that path and, if memory serves right, no more than three others on the paths leading into and between the hills.

The park near my house, covering one city block, and built on top of a subway tunnel, has a large lawn in the center, and three pairs of short benches on the outside, along pedestrian and bicycle paths leading to the nearby train station. The lawn is large, maintained and available to players of various sports such as volleyball, frisbee or football. Twice a year an area amateur theater group sets up a stage for performances of self-written musical agitprop plays about Bushitler and the evil capitalists of Haliburton Corporation, all for the enjoyment of the local sophisticates. The audience sits on the lawn.

Many of the few benches in city parks and tennis courts here have brass plaques on them stating that this bench was funded in memory of such and such person. Apparently, it is a popular way to memorialize some family member who has passed away, a person not necessarily famous or known or particularly accomplished in the big wide world. One donor said that she is comforted when she sees people relaxing on the bench bearing the name of her late husband. Fair enough.

Now the City Council is considering strictly limiting the number of memorial benches, which the city parks commission says destroy the "visual character" of the city's "parkland and urban forest". Urban forest? Oh, OK.

The Deputy City Manager says, "Do we want plaques and memorials strewn over our public parks? A lot of people are offended by it - they feel that the reminders of other people's family and friends diminishes the feeling of freedom and peace you're supposed to have in a public park."

According to the new rules "the honorees must have been dead for at least a year, their contributions to the city and its parks must be well documented, and the city's Parks and Recreation Commission must approve the nomination." Plus, it will cost $1200 for materials and installation.

All in the land of freedom from memory, and peace from concerns about others.

Saying and meaning

What women say and what they really mean...

Say: We need
Mean: I want

Say: It’s your decision
Mean: The correct decision should be obvious by now

Say: Do what you want
Mean: You’ll pay for this later

Say: We need to talk
Mean: I need to complain

Say: Sure...go ahead
Mean: I don’t want you to.

Say: I’m not upset
Mean: Of course I’m upset, you moron.

Say: You’re...so manly
Mean: You need a shave and you sweat a lot.

Say: You’re certainly attentive tonight.
Mean: Is sex all you ever think about?

Say: I’m not emotional! And I’m not overreacting!
Mean: I’m on my period.

Say: Be romantic, turn out the lights.
Mean: I have flabby thighs.

Say: Hang the picture there
Mean: No, I mean hang it there!

Say: I heard a noise
Mean: I noticed you were almost asleep.

Say: Do you love me?
Mean: I’m going to ask for something expensive.

Say: How much do you love me?
Mean: I did something today you’re really not going to like..

Say: I’ll be ready in a minute.
Mean: Kick off your shoes and find a good game on T.V.

Say: Is my butt fat?
Mean: Tell me I’m beautiful.

Say: You have to learn to communicate.
Mean: Just agree with me.

Say: Are you listening to me!?
Mean: [Too late, you’re dead.]

Say: Yes
Mean: No

Say: No
Mean: No

Say: Maybe
Mean: No

Say: I’m sorry.
Mean: You’ll be sorry.

Say: I’m not yelling!
Mean: Yes I am yelling because I think this is important.

The Name Game 2008

You can't avoid politics during this season. I've tried. Here's a short list of nicknames I have found for some of over dozen politicians of both major American political parties running for President of these United States next year. You can be sure this list isn't complete. Enjoy. Alphabetically:

Bacark Yomama
Breck Girl
Hitlery
Her Thighness
Huckleberry
The Huckster
Julie Annie
Kookcinich
McPain
McShame
McVain
Osama
Rooty
Rudy McRombee
RuPaul
Silky Pony

And here is a list of nicknames for the supporters of just one of the candidates:

consprazoids
Paultards
Paulbots
Paulistinians

One of the people with the clown names will be , sooner than you can imagine, the Leader of the Free World! Ouch!

Comic Desolation

The cafe next door was open, as was the pub. I went for a walk around downtown before returning to the pub for a couple of pints of dark ale. Christmas Day afternoon. The Indian deli was open, Mickey D's was closed. There was a line in front of one of two cinema multiplexes, a beggar pestering film aficionados. A bookstore called The Comic Relief, located between a fantasy bookstore and the best bookstore in town or anywhere Half Price Books, was open, at least a half a dozen customers inside. The Subway sandwich shop was open too, as were the two drugstores in the neighbourhood. Beggars, the homeless, a group of teenage punks at the plaza in front of the subway station which was open.

I stepped inside the pub. A basketball game was playing on the flat screen TVs. Not one familiar face among the two dozen customers. A half dozen goth punks at the bar and at tables. The barmaid, Erica, is a goth punk herself, her T-shirt this afternoon said "DESOLATION". She was the only staff member in. What if there is trouble, I wondered. Well, her goth punk friends drinking free beer would come to her aid, I concluded. The kitchen was closed as usual on holidays, and Erica could only heat up and serve yesterday's chili, if anyone asked.

A bearded, four eyed man, looking like the stereotype of a computer geek, sitting at the bar, wore a green sweatshirt with the following, supposedly Irish poem on the back of it:

May the roof above us
never fall in
And we friends beneath
never fall out

Fair enough. A fat, aging, bleached blonde goth punk woman at the bar was giving me The Look. Oh, no. My drinking buddy Mike soon arrived and we had one of our deep conversations. What's the next rebellious look, we wondered. What can beat the lip, eyebrow and nose earrings for outrageousness? When he gave up hippiedom, Mike said, he only had to cut his hair. How will they go straight with tattooes on every finger of the knuckle? And what about music, I asked? In the past century, it's come from Scott Joplin and Louis Armstrong, both classically trained, to the reductionist anti-music of the illiterate rap "artists". What's next? Good questions. We wished each other a Merry Christmas, I stepped out and drove home.