In his biography, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett gave the Kid a bad temper to make him seem more dangerous, so readers would think Garrett more heroic for going after such a dangerous outlaw. Of course, dime novelists ran with this idea, and therefore created the myth.
This will be a Saturday Random Ten week. I forgot about the FR10 last night and today, more or less. There was slightly more than usual to keep track of, albeit not really in a bad way.
And just when I was maybe starting to feel sorry for myself, along comes the magic of Guy Debord's Muppets to show me... Well, "hope" seems like the wrong word.
Been kind of a sneezy day. What are you gonna do? Keep blogging, I guess.
This is Fishbone from Saturday Night Live in 1991. That's Jeremy Irons introducing them. It's the kind of performance that can make you sit up and pay attention, as it did with me. Both times I've seen them live they've kept up an energy level like this.
ENJOY 40 from Chiara Guidi on Vimeo.
He was found guilty then of assaulting a female student by grabbing her while she tried to board a school bus. That same year, he faced charges for using false information to buy an “AK-47 type weapon,” according to a police report.Then:
Kibby later protested the bail conditions in a court filing, saying his firearms were “of immense equitable value” and that he was not a threat because he lived by an “objectivist libertarian moral code.”I wouldn't say that Kibby is representative of people who call themselves libertarians, but he is illustrative of the fact that the word "libertarian" need not mean much of anything. The most meaningful definition of freedom allows for it to be compatible with the same amount of freedom for all others. It obviously does not support depriving others - specifically women and young girls - of their most basic rights. And yet Kibby thinks he's for freedom. None so blind.
1.
Fairport Convention - Genesis Hall
2.
Broadcast - Tears in the Typing Pool
3.
Paul Simon - I Don't Believe
4.
Dirty Projectors - No Intention
5.
The Velvet Underground - I Heard her Call My Name
6.
Laurie Anderson - Walking and Falling
7.
Brian Eno - In Dark Trees
8.
The Band - In a Station
9.
Elvis Costello & the Attractions - You'll Never Be a Man
10.
Tito Puente - Lush Life
charcoal animation from Alesh macak on Vimeo.
Kind of weird, yes. It would be pretty hard to tease a plot out of it. Of course most dreams are like that too.
The description on Vimeo says it was all done on one piece of paper. Sure used the hell out of that scrap.Take a look at this for a moment.
This is a painting by Leonora Carrington, called La Dame Ovale ("the oval lady")
Carrington came from a somewhat upper crust English background, which she threw away when she ran away with Max Ernst. She's considered one of the surrealists. Over her long artistic career - started in the 1930s and continued until her dedath in the 2ooos - she went back and forth on that.
This painting could certainly be called surreal, being filled with inversions of the natural order. The chained dog has five human breasts. (An odd number, even!) Birds and bats nest underground. Many of the trees have bizarre shapes: fox heads, chess pieces.
What I noticed after looking at it for a few minutes was that nothing could quite be taken at face value. Most of the trees are, when you take the nature of painting into account, natural. So are most of the clouds. But you're forced to keep examining them because of their proximity to the other things. Meaning that art can show you not just new things, but train you in new ways to look.
Which brings us to the impossible unity of the Ramones. They all had the same last name. They all wore the same outfit and haircut. All the songs started with “1 2 3 4.” The monolithic, unified roar. And, most importantly, all the songs seem to come from a musical universe that they were the sole inhabitants of. Although their eagle logo and leather-clad image invited dopey imitation in the way all of rock music’s orthodox rebellion does, the Ramones’ original iconography not only illustrated they were tough, but that they were one. For an earlier music generation, the Beatles’ idea of the band as a gang, jumping over hilltops together, was part of their initial appeal. The Ramones were a gang as a band. A few years before his passing, Dee Dee Ramone complained about when he was starting with the band being forced to get a “Ramone” haircut. Having that small part of their image dismantled that way broke down more of the image of the band for me than I anticipated.
It is preposterous to call the Ramones performance art, but is there a more intentional, self-contained creative performance? The Ramones weren’t a band “about something.” While there were other high-concept bands that rival their singularity of statement—like Kraftwerk, the Residents, or Devo—those bands revolved around technology and enigma. The Ramones were self-reflexive: a rock band that was about the idea of a rock band. They took comic book violence and the deadest tropes of Beach Boys lyrics and placed them alongside tales of New York hustling as if it all was one piece. Authenticity wasn’t an issue. Authenticity was a joke.
From John Flansburgh's post-Tommy in memoriam on The Ramones. They Might Be Giants, Flansburgh's own band, occupies a different niche than the boyz from Queens, but he seems to get them.
After only a couple of years, Tommy decided that having been in the Ramones was great, but that he didn't want to keep doing it. Understandable, given the personalities involved. Still, he'll be remembered with them.
When I was a kid I was convinced that emus were called "ostriches." Because come on! "Australia" sounds like OSS-trail-ya, so how could they not have the birds whose name sounds the same. I guess ratite branding was a big thing to my younger self.
It's not clear how closely related ostriches, emus, rheas, cassowaries etc are, and whether they had a common ancestor on the superncontinent of Gondwana. As you can see here, ostrichese and emus don't look that much alike. Emu necks are much fluffier. They do dance/play together well, considering both birds are somewhat volatile to begin with
I've bitched before about how lots of songs have disappeared even from oldies radio, meaning that they gradually fade from cultural memory altogether. And honestly I'm not sure if this makes me sound like Proust or like Abe Simpson. (There's probably some hubris in even asking.) Still, enough barbarities from the past survive that you want to see the good, gentle things survive, if they can.
It's a little hard to believe that this group was produced by Kim Fowley, who later put together the Runaways, the jailbait hard rock group that introduced Joan Jett. Or maybe not unbelievable, just weird. The choruses are almost supernaturally sweet. The lead vocal is also sweet, but in a very human way. While the song may be kitschy, it's not impersonal.
7. Watch Someone Else Throw UpCan see the practical applications, but making it work seems awkward. I live alone. If I had a roommate, even a friendly one, I can't see being comfortable enough to ask him to yak in front of me. If I had a live-in girlfriend... well, same thing, really. There are almost certainly websites you can go to, but I'm not sure I want them in my browser history. So it's probably ipecac or one of the other options for me.
Seeing someone else throw up can often trigger the same response in your body. Though watching someone else throw up can be disgusting, that’s the point – you need to trigger that feeling in order to do it yourself. You can find videos of people throwing up online and use this if necessary. It might not work, but if it does, it will work very quickly.
