Berlin Beatet Bestes, a blog "mainly about odd German 45 rpm records"...

The Cult Following of Wagner's "Ring" Cycle

Within a few years of the composer’s death in 1883, the mania had spread so decisively that Wagner nights at Coney Island’s 3,000-seat Brighton Beach pavilion regularly sold out...

Age of Briggs & Stratton Watch: Creative Drunk Gets DUI on Motorized Bar Stool

Unit #1 was heading west bound on Kelly Lane. Unit #1 attempted to turn around (180 degrees), and back down Kelly east bound. As Unit #1 began its turn, it rolled over and the operator was injured."

"Note: Unit #1 was a home made [sic] motor vehicle, a bar stool attached to a frame with a lawn mower attached."

"At this point I noticed that Mr. Wygle's eye's [SIC] were very blood shot and were glassy in appearance."

"I asked him what happened, Mr. Wygle stated, 'I wrecked my bar stool.'"

"I asked Mr. Wygle how much alcohol he had to drink, he said, 'a lot.'"


"I asked if the bar stool even ran and said, 'yes, it will go around 38 miles per hour....'"

Local trees

from a rather good Onion series on country music: Shotgun Willie’s concept albums, or The voice of imperfect man must now be made manifest---

Heavenly Voice: You do know why you’re here.
Willie Nelson: Yes. There is great confusion on Earth and The Power That Is has concluded the following: Perfect Man has visited Earth already and his voice was heard. The voice of Imperfect Man must now be made manifest, and I have been selected as the most likely candidate.
Heavenly Voice: Yes. The time is April, therefore you, a Taurus, must go.
Second Heavenly Voice: To be born under the same sign twice gives strength.
Other Heavenly Voice: And this strength, combined with wisdom and love, is the key.

more

some very nice Free Vintage Desktop Wallpapers

via

Children of Paradise on TCM late tonight...

Jim Webb @ Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world's population; we have 25% of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .

In many cases these issues involve people’s ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .

Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons. . . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.

Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy - the whole area of drug policy in this country?

empire burlesque

The great perplexity involved in reading Negri comes from the sense that surely his concepts must, sooner or later, enter sublunary orbit, and hover over the terrain of politics, and provide something resembling an actual plan of action. But this is not quite what happens. The problem is not that the framework is abstract. Rather, it is that the system is just too beautiful. When actualities run counter to the theory, they are absorbed, and the theory instantly corrects itself by making flaws into features...

from p. 21 of the Samuel Beckett Letters:

I have been doing a little tapirising & reading Keats, you'll be sorry to hear. I like that crouching brooding quality in Keats - squatting on the moss, crushing a petal, licking his lips & rubbing his hands, 'counting the last oozings, hours by hours.' I like him the best of them all, because he doesn't beat his fists on the table. I like that awful sweetness and thick soft damp green richness. And weariness. 'Take into the air my quiet breath.' But there's nobody here to talk to, & it's so rarely one is enthusiastic, or glad of something...

25 years after the coal miner's strike--Remembering Britain’s forgotten civil war

‘I don’t think we could have gone back with any dignity at any time. So it was all out, it was out to the end, win or not. To do a year on strike was not easy, I don’t want to look back with rose-tinted glasses. But given the chance I’d have done exactly the same, I’ve no regrets at all. I just wished that we’d lamped a few more Bobbies.’

easy to forget that country music was as much a Canadian as an American invention: the link between Jimmy Rodgers & Hank Williams a certain Mr. Hank Snow of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, heard here at his relaxed best...

"Chilliwack Magnolia,2009" from Anodyne

"Bergotte pleased to hear Marcel has read every word he's written..."

from Resemblance: The Proust Portraits

via

Anita Carter

But more than the
cuts -- produced in Nashville and New York by Jerry Kennedy, Shelby
Singelton, and Milt Okun -- this recording reveals that Carter's voice
is one of the purest and most expressive vehicles either country or
folk ever produced.

Local trees

Joe Orton & Kenneth Halliwell's Defaced Library Books

Beckett & Eisenstein

Three months beforehand, in March, 1936, he had written—and this is hard to believe, even as one reads it—to Sergei Eisenstein, in Moscow, confessing to an interest in “the scenario and editing end” of cinema. “I am anxious to make contact with your mastery of these, and beg you to consider me a serious cinéaste worthy of admission to your school,” he added. There was no reply, and we are left to ponder what unholy offspring might have resulted from their collaboration, and what the director of “Battleship Potemkin” would have made of Beckett’s hope that “the industrial film will become so completely naturalistic, in stereoscopic colour and gramophonic sound, that a back water may be created for the two-dimensional silent film that had barely emerged from its rudiments when it was swamped.”

terrific Hypertextual & Illustrated Companion to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano