No More Wobbling!

In the past, you may have struggled to find the one item that meets all specified horn requirements, but now your worries are over.

Presenting...the Dudehorn!

The Dudehorn has been stringently redesigned expressly for dudes. No longer will you be bound by outmoded and frankly cumbersome horn standards. No, the Dudehorn presents fully rounded, 100% retensible reimaginings of the classic horn stratagems in a thoroughly modern package, but without any of the unpleasant strictures formerly imposed by over-stringent interpretation of typical horn modules. Fully compliant with all currently enacted regulations, yet flexible enough to accommodate the most recent emendations merely by cupping the donor gimble with the included ANSI adapter.

The Dudehorn.

It's for you.

egads!

I've written before that Texans are different from us. In that post, I could also have mentioned the curious phenomenon, which could either be rather enticing or reticing (to invent a new word), that many Texan females are of the opinion that - rather like these women's state of residence - largeness is the best possible improvement their breasts might undergo. Unfortunately, the second-best improvement seems to be leatherizing their skin in an endless succession of tanning booths...so walking on the streets presented far too many examples of decolletage revealing two partially deflated and rather worn footballs stuffed into a swath of fabric nowhere near capacious enough to contain them.

The other thing Texan women like large is their hair. This photo does not allow us to judge any other volume enhancements its subject may have undergone - but for her own safety and reputation outside the great state of Texas, I have cropped this image (which was a header ad that showed up at my Houston Chronicle comics page) to remove her name and the product being advertised.

just a thought

Does anyone else think it'd be really funny if Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Ben Sheets' favorite musician were Ben Folds?

C'mon, cuz like, you know, "folds," "sheets"...

Where'd everybody go?

this ain't no disco

David Byrne (scroll down that link for the quote), with an apt metaphor explaining bluntly why we need to get the fuck out of Iraq, now:

"Some folks are saying we broke it we should fix it. Tell that to someone who comes into your house and smashes all the furniture. That’s not the repairperson I would call. You might want to sue them, or kill them, or have them thrown in jail, but you don’t want them in your house ever again."

News Flash! Bill O'Reilly Discovers Black People Are Human!

This is pretty unbelievable: I mean, he was actually surprised that, you know, it wasn't the middle of a stereotypical gangsta rap video?

Next up: O'Reilly discovers that Latinos do not all carry knives or wear bandoliers and sombreros at all times. Some even lack mustaches!

got extra cash sitting around? Of course you do!

I'll be participating in AIDS Walk Wisconsin 2007. I realize that many of you have local causes to support, but if you're feeling generous, you can contribute to this one as well. Then again, one wonderful aspect of this here internet thing is that "local" is a neighborhood of the mind and of the heart. So, if you feel you're here - you are.

The idea, as you probably know, is that people contribute on my behalf to help me meet my fundraising goal. More info is available here. You can pledge directly on my behalf by visiting my personal page. Once there, merely click on the "Donate" graphic above the thermometer.

Thanks in advance to any of my readers who chooses to contribute.

most grievously!

In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I present to you two tracks from our second-favorite eyepatch-wearing, swashbuckling, sex-obsessed dude: Momus. The first track is a version of Oskar Tennis Champion's "Is It Because I'm a Pirate?" prior to John Talaga's "mangling, micro-engineering and re-splicing."

The second is an Ocky Milk outtake called "Bonsai Tree," whose creepy minimalist dub (including "Imaginaican" accent) seems aptly piratical.

Both tracks were posted either at Momus's old website or at his Live Journal site Click Opera. Momus often posts tracks for free, but if you enjoy them and wish to donate to further his musical efforts, there's a Paypal link on this page.

(Who's our favorite EWSSOD? Why Xander Harris, of course.)

Momus "Is It Because I'm a Pirate?" (Oskar Originals, 2003)
Momus "Bonsai Tree" (2006)

FAC 501

By way of Zoilus: Apparently, Tony Wilson's coffin was given a Factory number. As Carl Wilson comments, "Now, I want to know if Peter Saville designed Wilson a gravestone." Since Saville seemed frequently inspired by stone inscriptions, that would also be fitting...

"Britney Spears' vagina is kinda like the Bible..."

I am still not the Pope: here's a hilarious (and spot-on) rant via the fine folks at Drink at Work:

Jane Espenson explains it all

Via Fluxblog, ex-Buffy and Gilmore Girls writer Jane Espenson analyzes a spate of not getting it regarding the sorry not all that funny joke Sarah Silverman made at Britney Spears' expense. (BTW: if Britney was "fat," I'm the Pope.)

Syntactic reanalysis: it's not just for breakfast any more. I do wish, though, she'd included as an example one of my favorites of this type - the "punchline" to "Lola": "Well I'm not the world's most masculine man, but I know what I am, and I'm glad I'm a man - and so's Lola."

Al Stewart sniffs the breeze...

At what point does a convenient shorthand evocation - either visual or verbal - turn into an idiotic cliche that reveals the writer or artist as a lazy hack?

When I say so, of course.

Exhibit 1: The use by cartoonists, greeting-card illustrators, and the kind of people who draw clip art of a black beret as signifier for "artist." I mean, I'm sure there are artists who've worn black berets...but the black beret as visual image has come so much to mean "I am the sort of person who pronounces the word 'artist' with a long e accented on the second syllable" that I have a hard time imagining anyone who's not utterly clueless actually wearing one. Unless they are, of course, an arteest. Or the kind of person who'll end up in jail after saying to the Homeland Security folks at LAX, "so, like, if I made a joke about a bomb in my suitcase would you have to arrest me?"

Exhibit 2: "Patchouli" as the universally accepted scent of hippies. (Insert "body odor" joke here - and it'll be Exhibit 3.) I honestly have no idea what patchouli actually smells like - although I suspect I actually have inhaled its odors. (At this point yellojkt may well point out that since I already blah-blah'd about shopping at a food co-op, I've outed myself as at least part-hippie anyway. I'll have to cut off the soles of my shoes, climb a tree, and learn to play the flute next.) But was it really so all-pervasive, so exemplary to the exclusion of all other scents, that years later it should be the all-purpose device to connote hippiedom? I mean pity those other scents, they get no respect, do they - it's all patchouli this, patchouli that.

I remember when I was kid, wondering why no circus I'd ever gone to had a fat lady, the supposedly popular name "Sam" was used by no one I knew, and no one I knew had a dog called "Spot." Funny the way these sorts of labels persist.

so that explains it...

Subject line on some spam: "Roves Legacy Tainted by Steroids."

Those wacky spammers. Always with the wit.

not to see the sun

A very cool video (by way of Lord Whimsy):

three thousand flags

Walking on campus today, I noticed that a group had placed a large number of flags across a grassy area on the mall between the Union and the library. (Here's a link to image from the campus newspaper.) I assumed (correctly, as it turned out) these flags were meant to commemorate the victims of 9/11 - but I found myself thinking that in some ways, the flag was an odd symbol to choose. Looking over a list of victims, I noticed that about fifty victims were not from America (the non-Americans were primarily Mexican, British, and Canadian, but several other nations were represented).

This, of course, accords with the symbology of the attack, whose two targets, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, seemed chosen to represent military and economic power - a multinationalist economic power embodied in the WTC's very name. One could argue, in fact, that it's the very internationalist, non-parochial potential of trade (leaving aside for now arguments about favoring the mobility across national lines of capital over people) that opposes it to the fundamentalism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, since fundamentalism rests upon a pre-sorted identity, an exclusion of the disfavored, a defining and utterly delimited naming of "truth," to which the post-national flexibility exemplified by the presence of citizens of so many nations in a single place would be anathema. For any fundamentalism, truth is fixed, received once in a revelation regarded as literally divine. There's no question of interpretation, modification, or a loyal opposition: you're either with us, or with the infidels.

If the flags mourning these victims of many nations might represent America at its best, as essentially the first post-national nation ("post-national" because its ideals and its citizens are not native, nor imagined as exclusively and specifically so; instead, there's no national tongue, no national blood, only shared ideals which are explicitly universalist, not limited to a chosen few people), then the victims are appropriately memorialized. Certainly no one asked them for their citizenship or passport before they were untimely obliterated.

In this light it's sadly ironic to see where the post-9/11 world has come - since America at its worst seeks by force to extend a monolithic, rigid set of ideals, ideals of economics, of control, of ideology and "democracy from above." In this reading the sad irony is that the international victims, who in life might have proudly proclaimed their British, Mexican, or other citizenship, find themselves posthumously ruled American by fiat, by decree.

But as I've written before (in rather a different context), there's only one nation, and it both extols and extinguishes those better ideals. And so one of the sadder aspects of the US post-9/11 is way borders have dissolved utterly for capital (flowing one way) and jobs (the other), while rigidifying for humans, both at the physical borders and in the psychological borders within the nation, separating people on the basis of name, color, or employment. (Legally, by the way, anyone earning money in this nation, citizen or not, licitly employed or not, is compelled to pay taxes on that income - regardless of whether they have any voice in the nation's affairs. Taxation without representation, anyone?) Capital moves across the face of the nations, leaving its borders waste and without form, but frowns on the dark faces chained to its machinery.

I'd like to end with some rousing peroration about those three thousand flags, about the need to make them reflect our ideals rather than a will to power, but I'm feeling rudderless and powerless at the moment, as lies and distortion wash over us in a surge of propaganda, and our supposed loyal opposition is so loyal its opposition looks more like an exact reflection. So, sorry.

suddenly it's always night time

In his track notes to the fabulous new Challengers by the New Pornographers, Carl "A.C." "Ace" "The Man With Too Many Nicknames" Newman observes that the string arrangement in particular on "All the Old Showstoppers" is a tribute to Roy Wood's "brilliantly primitive string work." This is unsurprising to me, since I remember thinking that some of the arrangements on Newman's solo album The Slow Wonder were similar to early ELO. ("My Rights Versus Yours" from Challengers can be heard at the band's website.)

Wood was the main songwriter with The Move, a band that never received the acclaim here that it should have, being in many ways a link connecting the Beatles, the Who, and Cheap Trick (Cheap Trick covered that band's "California Man," in fact). Near the end of The Move's run, another songwriter from a fellow Birmingham band came in as its guitarist and, eventually, vocalist: Jeff Lynne. Lynne, of course, went on to found Electric Light Orchestra, which went on to become a byword for excessive production in the late '70s and early '80s (to the extent that Randy Newman, of all people, wrote a bizarre tribute/roasting called "The Story of ELO" - bizarre not least because even though he uses the real band's (nick)name, quotes several of its song titles, and parodies those songs in his track, he uses fake names for the band members. (Why Randy Newman felt the need to say anything about ELO is a puzzlement...)

I should have written that Lynne co-founded ELO - since Wood shared singing and songwriting duties on that band's premier album, amusingly mistitled No Answer in the US (it was supposed to have been self-titled). And the early ELO is quite a different beast from the precision-polished chart machine it became at its commercial peak (and quite different yet from the pathetic embarrassment it later became).

The concept originally was for both groups, The Move and Electric Light Orchestra, to co-exist with the same personnel, distinguished from one another by musical approach. ELO's prospectus was to mix classical structures and instrumentation with rock energy and personality (this was 1971; that idea was at that time almost a new one). But as Lynne's more baroque writing style became more prominent in The Move, and as Wood incorporated his developing multi-instrumental capabilities in that band, it became clear that the two acts' coexistence was rather redundant. Fortuitously, Lynne was itching to be the sole leader of a band - so ELO broke off with Wood and hired an almost entirely new contingent of musicians (retaining drummer Bev Bevan). This new ensemble recorded the album that was to be the beginning of the band's US success: Electric Light Orchestra II, and its single, a version of "Roll Over Beethoven" that rather incongruously yoked in quotations from Beethoven (primarily the famous opening of his fifth symphony) with the Chuck Berry tune.

That's where my history with the band begins: I heard the abbreviated single mix of "Roll Over Beethoven" and was entranced with it. So I bought the single, and later ELO II became one of the first LPs I bought with my own money (earned from my paper route). I can't say now that I think the song works - the long version (linked above) is precariously close to a joke - but: the rock parts rock, and Lynne, no matter what else you can say about him, had a great rock'n'roll voice and sings the hell out of this one. If this was an academic project, it was one he meant.

It wasn't until many years later that I found out the band's prehistory with and as The Move (whose music I now prefer, generally, over that of ELO). The band's next album, On the Third Day, was its most rock'n'roll, with "Ma-Ma-Ma Belle" featuring a great Stonesy riff. It was the band's fourth album Eldorado, though, that became its breakthrough success. The handful of string players was largely supplanted by a full orchestra and choir (eventually, that "classical" business would be reduced largely to window-dressing), and the more chart-friendly, polished sound most people associate with the band became more apparent.

Going backwards, though: On the first album, almost all the "classical" instruments were played by Roy Wood himself. While obviously a talented musician, Wood had only recently taken up the additional instruments he played on this recording (which include cello, oboe, string bass, bassoon, clarinet, and recorders). His rough technique gave the playing on this record a very distinctive sound, most notably the cellos, which sometimes sound more like sawing wood in tune than cellos. (Very rock'n'roll.) His own "Look at Me Now" is a good illustration: judging from that list of instruments (he also plays various guitars and percussion), Wood plays nearly everything on this track: his sometimes precarious pitch and gleefully rough attack complement the lyrical portrait of a man worried he's about to lose it. Jeff Lynne's song "Queen of the Hours" exploits Wood's sawing cello-playing as its distinctive sonic signature (it was also the US b-side of the "Roll Over Beethoven" single, which is where I first heard it). You get a glimpse here of Lynne's distinctive melodic/harmonic tendencies in the way his opening vocal phrase slides down from the tonic, to the seventh, to a flattened sixth to go with the flatted IV chord (which, in turn, prepares us for the minor turn of the rest of the phrase's chords).

ELO II is Lynne's album, and it finds the band at its most prog-influenced: long songs, the occasional odd time signature, suite-like structures featuring extended instrumental introductions, etc. Even though the band now features "real" string players, Lynne was apparently fond of the roughness of Wood's playing...as the brutally sawed attacks of the cellos that open "In Old England Town (Boogie #2)." Once the song proper starts (and I'm sure some folks would prefer that happen much sooner than it does...), the way Lynne borrows from and extends certain Beatlesque songwriting tricks is apparent. The chord sequence is quite jumpy, exploiting devices ranging from chromatic runs to using both major and minor chords in order to motivate that moving around. The melody cleverly deploys its most keening and plangent accents during chord sequences that are furthest removed from the song's essential progression, so that when both chords and melody return to predictability, the impact of that return is intensified.

It's interesting to wonder whether Lynne's later ability to fold such oddness into songs that still fit traditional structures (and hence, fit audience's notions of hit songs) would have happened without that prog moment. As excessive and amateur as the kitchen-sink approach might seem, without it I think it's less likely that his more pop-oriented work in the band's classic period from Eldorado through Out of the Blue would have been as distinctive as it is.

Electric Light Orchestra "Look At Me Now" (Electric Light Orchestra/No Answer, 1971)
Elecric Light Orchestra "Queen of the Hours" (Electric Light Orchestra/No Answer, 1971)
Electric Light Orchestra "Roll Over Beethoven" (Electric Light Orchestra II, 1973)
Electric Light Orchestra "In Old England Town (Boogie #2)" Electric Light Orchestra II, 1973)

driven to distraction

Exhibit #7,324 concerning why it's a good idea I did not choose a career as a cartoonist (aside from the obvious fact that I cannot draw):
(clicking=enlarging)

not dead

Busy.

All I can think of to say right now is: it seems the writing credit for most mainstream movies these days ought to go to the renowned Richard T. Joaks.

Or his brother, Fartholomew.

(To do this right, you have be a bit meta.)