YouTube - Ambitious Lovers play Copy Me
why the 80's were cool...
Saturday, September 01, 2007
a rare item--eBay.ca: Jack Lord's Unabridged International Dictionary Signed--turns out it's his Webster's rather than one he wrote, but still...
YouTube - Sandy Denny - Who Knows Where the Time Goes - Demo recording
from Nina Simone's introduction to her live version...
"We are recording tonight and if this were a recording we'd be trying to do some things but actually I'm too tired to do. But as Faye Dunaway, I think it was, she said, when Bonnie and Clyde come out, she said she tried to give people what they wanted. That's a mistake, really, I know. You can't do everything, you use up everything you've got trying to give everybody what they want.
But I will learn my lesson soon, and then you will buy more records, right, cause you're gonna see me. Let's see what we can do with this lovely, lovely thing that goes post all racial conflict and all kinds of conflict, it's a reflective tune. And sometime in your life you'll have occasion to say, what is this thing called time? You know what, what is that? The clock, you go to work by the clock, you get your martini in the afternoon by the clock, you drink your coffee by the clock, you have to get on the plane at a certain time, and it goes on and on and on. And time is a dictator, as we know it. Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive? Is it a thing that we cannot touch and is alive? And then one day you look in a mirror, how old, and we say where did the time go? We leave you with that one..."
a worthy cover by the Pindrop Band...
NYC Tugboat Races!
“Because what it quickly evolved into was a great—forget the spectators for a minute—it became a great celebration within the tugboat community. And it was a chance for the tugboaters to bring their families on their tugs, deck them out with flags and stuff.”
On September 2, the 15th annual New York Tug Boat Race & Competition will begin at 10:30 a.m. at Pier 84 (at West 44th Street) with a parade of tugs, a fireboat spraying water and a Coast Guard Cutter..."
a book--Tugboats of New York: An Illustrated History
& earlier this year--The International Tugboat Race on the Detroit River
Friday, August 31, 2007
Once Upon a Time in Hannover
"Half of my “doof-Deutsch” alone probably comes from repeat screenings of Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volt ail West, 1968), Sergio Leone’s classic epic based on a story written by Leone himself alongside Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, and with a script by Sergio Donati. But I didn’t know it under its Italian or English title. I knew this film as Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod, which translates into “Play me the Song of Death.” And, to this day, THAT title is the one that still gives me goosebumps. Looking at all the other options, I have to say that, in my book, it wins – hands down – over all other entries. Huuliharppukostaja… ? C’mon, Finland! You can do better than that! Spain snoozes on the job with Hasta que llego su hora (“Until his time came,” yawn). Most translations just shoot for the equivalent of “It was once a western,” and let me tell you that whether you’re in Hungary (Volt egyszer egy vadnyugat) or the Netherlands (Het Gebeurde in het westen), that’s just not putting a gun to your temple and urging you to take a seat..."
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
Stravinsky Says
No Mozart menu chalkboard,
he wrote at the keyboard--
& orchestrated it as he went along.
Tea weak hots espresso strong,
for breakfast two eggs shot raw--
before he wrote music he'd learned how to draw.
"We need blotting paper, not echo chambers," he said
To illustrate the sludge-like texture of his blood,
or spend your life with rubber-daggered strangers
dragging your feet through the Mississippi mud
standing on your head in case of a flood--
rhythms just a reminder, the rhyme's the thing...THUD--
(Mondrian--"close the window. I can't bear trees!"--)
the thing itself, forked and folding in twos & threes,
hands fluttered like turtledoves above his knees
he was the calmest man I'd ever seen.
We'll make it back to Lubeck, Texas when we can--
it's the state capital of marzipan,
Bach, Buxtehude, bernstein (amber) &
Buddenbrooks, Hanseatic laughter &
wrapping each page in a colored ribbon after.
a successor to Gould's 1955 Goldberg Variations?
"I'm as tough a sell as any. Perhaps because of my impressionable age at the time of its release, I seem to have imprinted on Gould's '55 disk. Nothing—not Murray Periaha's refinement, not Maria Tipo's grace, not even Gould's more spacious 1981 revision, the eerie capstone and aria da capo to his career—could shake my allegiance. Until, that is, last fall..."
an old "mosses" favorite Marcel Broodthaers interviews a cat...(ps the film archives film showing in nyc is sold out they tell me)
Gonezales
"I honestly thought nothing was going to happen to Fredo as long as Barbara Bush stayed alive."
What makes Southern sweet tea so special?
"If ice was a luxury, then putting out a pitcher of ice-cold tea must have been quite a bit of hospitality. One historian, Joe Gray Taylor, wrote in "Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South: An Informal History" that the rural electrification—and, consequently, refrigeration—wrought by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s was 'probably more appreciated for the ice cubes it provided … than for any of its other services.'"
Sunday, August 26, 2007
in sweet tea news--Cool drinks and the inevitable arrow of time
"Although we have been describing a gas, entropy works the same way for any type of material, including your icy drink. While the ice and water in your glass is relatively cold, the temperature of the air around it, especially in the hot summer months, is much warmer. The randomly moving molecules in the air will attempt to spread out to the cooler ice and water. Eventually, the entropy of the ice and water will increase, the ice will melt to water, and finally the water will warm to the same temperature of the surrounding air..."
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