Like a Daydream

I heard Ride's "Nowhere" this month and knew right away I'd found my missing link to Blur's "Leisure" and Galaxie 500 and Sloan and all these great shoegazer/stoner groups, but then I ordered this EP and realized the true treasures of the group were their first two 4-song EPs, "Ride" and "Play," both from 1990. This CD of all eight songs really lifts you off the ground with noise, melody and artful bombast. Youthful indescretion finds its perfectly complimentary guitar noise. If the muddled beauty of "Close My Eyes" doesn't get you, I don't know what will. The opening lyrics: Last night I had such a good time/but there's a price to pay/ A night full of kicks, now the sun's in my eyes/And I feel so weary today... Listen, believe, smile.

this can apply to life as well

click to make readable -- image and text reprtinted from "The Star Wars Question & Answer Book About Computers" by Fred D'Ignazio, Random House, 1983, pilfered from the library at the now-nonexistent Roesland Elementary. More lessons from video cocktail tables to come.

the sad fate of mossby pomegranete

Though surfing the Web can be a time-and-soul-draining experience, www.archive.org is a sure thrill for online curiosity seekers, video clip collectors and fans of cultural ephemera. The site compiles a bunch of articles, software, recordings and multimedia for anyone to look through. The most extensive and fascinating collection of videos can be found in the Prelinger Archives, founded by Rick Prelinger in 1982. Dave Coates told me about this site while showing me a bunch of strange, strange clips therein.

Among the videos Dave played for me were instructional videos for police on how to deal with belligerent or mentally handicapped citizens, some kind of filmstrip from the '50s for kids about removing living organs from pets, and the crown jewel of the Internet Archives, "One Got Fat."

"One Got Fat" is ostensibly a 14-minute filmstrip about bicycle safety (Interlude Films, 1963, Dale Jennings, writer/director). It features 10 bike riders facing various safety obstacles on their way to a park nine blocks away. Which sounds tame enough. Except that the cyclists are monkeys, and all but one are led by their own carelessness head-on into steamrollers, manholes and other dangers. The death masks of the monkey cyclists are pretty severe, and it's hard to believe they showed this to kids (a dozen or so comments on the archive.org site are from people who remember being freaked out by the film in grade school). As Dave put it, it's interesting to see something from an era before irony, when the accepted way to try and get kids to behave was to scare the hell out of them.

Don't be mistaken, though. "One Got Fat" is great fun. The monkeys each meet their grisly fates in ridiculous ways and their names are as colorful as their costumes. Names include: Rooty Toot Jasperson, Slim Jim McGutney, Filbert Bagel, Stanislaw Higginbottum, Tinkerbelle McDillingfitty and my personal favorite, Mossby Pomegranete (e-mail mossby@gmail.com). I think it would be great if they each had their own trading cards, complete with photos, stats and safety information. The film also boasts a delightful fanfare, stirring narration from Edward Everett Horton and some bizarro cinematography.

You can find "One Got Fat" by going to archive.org, finding the "moving pictures" menu and locating the Prelinger Archives, where several viewing options and more information are available. Or, you can see it here on google video. Ride safe and love it.

4/20 Photo Flashback

This picture is an outtake of a series taken on April 20, 2003. Josh had an idea to take a bunch of Polaroids of Jennifer, himself and I wearing her wigs and standing together in traditional familial poses. We were a happy family, I have to admit.

larry versus the microburst

Kansans' heads are filled with tornado stories from an early age, be they from movies, news reports or poet-hobos who wander the streets telling folks about the night they rode a twister across county lines and in and out of reality. Rarely, however, are we lucky (or unlucky) enough to actually witness such an event.

March 12 was one of those big days for folks in Lawrence. At around 8 in the morning, some crazy winds bent a bunch of signs, messed up some buildings and felled trees all over town. One of my friends saw the swirling winds directly above him and claimed it was one of the most intense things he'd ever experienced. Another was on the toilet at the time and felt his entire house shake, presumably from the tornado. Most folks either took shelter or slept through it.

I had planned to stay up all night and drive from Kansas City to Lawrence that morning, but all that coffee at Chubby's at 6 a.m. just put me to sleep. I didn't drive up until after the KU vs. Texas Big 12 Championship basketball game, a resounding victory for the 'Hawks. Brother James and I drove up K-10, marvelling at the way the giant green highway signs were curled back. The signs looked so awkward bent up like that, as if some giant had messed with them for his own amusement.

Fortunately, Jennifer and Brother David got up early to take some photos of the chaos. Although I was a late arriver on the scene, I did record a few observations.

The streets were full of debris and broken trees, including several I used to duck around and under on walks to campus.

Downtown, the U.S. Bank revolving door was bashed in, awnings were ripped out and two steeples were toppled from an old brick church, making it once again look like some giant with a perverse sense of symmetry had acted in violent disdain against our beloved college town. The sirens had stopped working earlier, so when there was another tornado warning that afternoon, police officers drove around with megaphones and megaphoned for everyone to take shelter. Most people ignored them.

On Ninth Street, the sign at Jensen's liquor store had been blown out, but the line to buy booze was almost out the door. People were stocking up like it was the last day anyone would be selling liquor ever. The clerks had the new Roelofs album playing overhead, adding nicely to the apocalyptic effect.

On Mississippi street, David's bike had been thrown into the middle of the yard along with the porch fence it was locked to. We sipped beers and drank in the weirdness around back where the porch was more intact. The wooden owl on the outside staircase looked pretty ominous in the stormy twilight, as did the branches overhead. Across the street at the stadium, the hammer/discus cage had been pitifully beat in. There was greenish haze all over town, the result of everything having been stirred up at once. "It was like we were living in a zombie movie," someone said later.

By evening, people had grown a bit bolder in celebrating the weather and KU victory. Fireworks and shouts rang out from Oread apartment complexes. People gathered on lawns to drink and barbecue by the light of tiki torches. It was Lawrence at its finest, and I don't mean that in a "banding together to help one another" way, though I'm sure some of that went on. It was more of a "classes are canceled, my DVD player won't work and it's not like I'll be paying for the damage to my apartment, so let's go outside and be weird" vibe.

After dark, South Park was pitch black and blocked off, its darkness both foreboding and appealing, as if the park had suddenly become a boundless haven for revelers and murderers. The streetlamps around the playground and bandstand were all knocked out, and it looked like what it would have been like had the Ents lost their battle with Isengaard.

We drove West on Sixth Street to get some food and watch the news from Kaspar's (or whatever it's called now). On the way we passed by the rocket in Centennial Park, which might have been the strangest thing I had seen all day. Even in broad daylight, the structure looks like a curious remnant from and/or tribute to the cold war. But in the midst of all the damage, fireworks and lingering flashes of lightning, the fake warhead took on a brand new absurdity. It was as if to say, "Should the communists or tornadoists decide to return to Lawrence, Lawrence will be ready."

the marshmallows of sorrow

This is a post for Good Friday, known as "Karfreitag" in the country in which this photo was taken. Jennifer took this shot last March during our tour of the Rheinland. As far as church holidays go, I always liked Good Friday, its solemn processions, the dirge/hymns sung at a snail's tempo about garden meditations and sleepy, unreliable friends. There's a pathos and romance to it that the rest of the church calendar lacks, and I think this photo does a good job of capturing it.

The location is Bad Godesberg, Germany, Villenviertel neighborhood, March 2005. The building behind the gate is the once-proud sanitorium/studentenwohnheim of Rheinallee 37-43, built in 1894, turned into student apartments in 1972 and shut down just months after I moved out in summer 2002. The "passion" in this case is Rheinallee's demise and subsequent renovation into luxury apartments. God only knows how the project has turned out, having long since abandoned its red brick walls and lush courtyard to partial demolition and deforestation, respectively.

Such is the fate of old buildings. Their original structures are altered and repurposed, but the spirits of their inhabitants dilly-dally on the premises. When I went by last year to view the ruins of Rheinallee, I swear I could hear my friends and I through the window in the second-floor balcony, laughing, listening to music and pouring wine into tea glasses, waiting for a nachtbus that would never come.

hootinanity

My new Deering "Goodtime" banjo is the most aptly-named instrument I have ever known. I bought it a few weeks ago at Mountain Music Shoppe in Shawnee and every time I pick it up I have a hard time putting it back down. With my new five string, a few blues harps and a bit of inspiration from folks like Sonny Terry and Two Dollar Shoe, I've dabbled quite a bit in Americana lately.

This past Friday night, we had us a hootenanny. It went down in a kitchen on tennessee street with Zach, Ben and I yelling and me playing harp, someone playing spoons and a storm blowing in. When I told my friend Nick about it the next day he said it sounded like it was "the hootenaniest hootenanny to ever hoot a nanny."

It amazed me, the way Nick made that line up on the spot and delivered it like it was nothing. I did some thinking later and decided that hootenanny would make a great separable prefix verb in German, namely, Nannyhooten.

For example, "Wir haben eine Nanny gehootet."

sample dialogue:

Lars: Klara, Heute Abend hooten wir eine Nanny. Hast du Lust, mitzuhooten?

Klara: Ja, ich habe Lust, aber leider kann ich nicht so gut nannyhooten :(

Lars: Quatsch! Das kann Jeder! Deshalb machen Hootenannys so viel Spass!

Or something like that. That won't be of much interest to you if you don't speak German, but if you don't, maybe it will help encourage you to learn. Maybe.

I will leave you now with a photo of a man called Apple-Core Jack. He is so named because he was carved from an apple core, and the name Jack seems to fit. I salvaged him from my grandfather's house shortly before the bulldozers took it down.

A Hundred Million Years Ago, in 1987

Record Review: Once Upon A Dinosaur
Artist: Jane Murphy et al

As a dedicated crate digger, I know how rare it is to find an album that is musically impressive, educational and heartwarming enough to make you smile. But when I recently came across a record with cover art depicting triceratops going down a slide and a dimetrodon holding colored balloons, I knew I had found something special.

The album, "Once Upon A Dinosaur," is children's songwriter Jane Murphy's musical attempt to open children's hearts and minds to those most fascinating of ancient creatures, the dinosaurs. Originally released on vinyl and cassette in 1987 and now available on compact disc on Amazon.com, "Once Upon A Dinosaur" explores what life as a dinosaur was all about as well as asking what our lives would be like if dinosaurs were still around today.

The album kicks off with a rocker, namely, The Fossil Rock. The Fossil Rock follows the story of some scientists who chip, chip away until they uncover bones so big, they could only belong to a dinosaur. The song itself is fairly repetitive, but a key change and some soulful saxophone make this opening number engaging as well as educational.

The album's strongest song is the next tune, "We Want To Learn About Dinosaurs." Regardless of whether listeners approach the album with a sense of ironic amusment or genuine childlike wonder, they'll be taken aback by this ballad's emotional impact. With sweeping harp arpeggios and a plaintive piano finale, the instrumentation in "We Want To Learn About Dinosaurs" is powerful on its own, but the children's chorus featured on the song is what pushes the album into truly heart-rending territory.

The rest of the album follows through on its promise to teach us about dinosaurs. In just 37 minutes, many different dinosaurs are discussed, with songs switching perspectives as well as topics. Some song tell a story from the third person, such as the fifties doo-wop number, "Ankylosaurus and Paleocincus," which chronicles the unlikely friendship between two dinos with spiky shells. Others resort to the first-person to better explore a character, as in "The Stegosaurus" or "Big Bad Al," the latter of which is a daunting depiction of Tyrannosaurus' smaller ancestor, the Allosaurus. "The Brachiosaurus' Song" is a ballad about what it's like to weigh as much as 20 elephants. Although Brachiosaurus lived millions of years ago, it's hard not to interpret some of the lyrics to "The Brachiosaurus' Song" as a dig at modern American obesity and ignorance, especially the line: "I may be huge, but I'm not clever at all/because my brain's just the size of a ping-pong ball." Interesting.

As socially relevant as these songs may be, the album truly shines when the vocalists address the dinosaurs and dinosaur lovers directly, such as on the closing number, "Where Have They Gone?" The song begins with a lone male vocalist listing off the names of the dinosaurs alphabetically, a lonely echo enveloping his voice as it travels up and down the scale. Soon after, the children join in, their voices gradually steering the song's mood from one of melancholy abandonment to solemn curiosity. Like a kid's choir singing to the baby Jesus at a holiday pageant, the children's voices in "Once Upon A Dinosaur" have a timeless resonance, as if the dinosaurs they are addressing are as near to their hearts as they are distant on the geological timeline.

Still, I did have a bone to pick with "Once Upon A Dinosaur." The album's utopian depiction of dino/human co-existence will appeal to those who have always resented scientists saying dinosaurs couldn't have lived with us (which is another way of saying we couldn't have lived with them). However, "Once Upon A Dinosaur" assumes in several cases that if dinosaurs were alive today, they would serve mostly as pets.

In "My Pet Tyrannosaurus," a witch's hex turns the family dog into a T-Rex. This tale of a girl taking her T-Rex to school and attempting to keep it out of the family fridge is amusing--as is mom's proclamation that "this house just isn't big enough for a tyrant lizard"--but the part about T-Rex enjoying being "tickled on the nose and washed down with the garden hose" is highly unlikely, not to mention a slight to T-Rex's tough-guy reputation. The mention of a "dinosaur zoo" elsewhere in the album is also alarming in spite of its naivete. These well-intentioned sentiments are forgiveable considering "Once Upon A Dinosaur" is an album made for and by children, but the assumptions of dinodomesticity smack of the same hubris that eventually led to Jurassic Park's demise.

Fortunately, the beats and instrumentation on the album are every bit as diverse as the lyrics and subject matter. There's some honky-tonk, some (reptile) rap and some synth-bass and synth-percussion that would be right at home on an album by the Flying Lizards, another group whose records I found at the sale.

Thematically, the album's premise that dinosaurs never go out of style rings true, and the fact that "Once Opon A Dinosaur" sounds very 1987 is ultimately irrelevant. In the end, it's just a big, educational dance party, as the song "Dinosaur Dance" makes abundantly clear. As the song's chorus contends, "Whether up on two feet, or down on all fours/it's fun to dance like the dinosaurs." How very, very true.