Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Louche Lad's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
5:00 pm	Curiosa There's a brokerage firm that keeps sending me these weird little presents even though I haven't dealt with them directly in at least five years. Cuff links, balsa gliders, scented candles (!), hand-painted chicken eggs, all this creepy Harry Smith bric-a-brac; today it was a football that I now have to either throw away or keep around for my estate to one day find and cope with. When you're alive you can defer these questions but the minute you're dead all the overhanging intangibles are realized one way or another and all your prize possessions turn back into junk, or more to the point get mixed up with it. The implications of this for incorrigible collectors are rarely explored. If you're in love with something relatively conventional like automata or silver age comic books or old master drawings or uranium-glaze fiestaware, the market for your stuff will outlive you and your estate will be able to unload it to people who carry your particular virus. But if your kink is rarefied (paper airplanes, bottle caps, matchbooks, vintage porn) you'll be lucky to end up like the Philadelphia Wireman, with all your holy little world bagged and dumped with your corpse. In many ways this is the question of our age. Sometimes people spend their lives collecting a thing like stamps or player piano rolls, and then where are they left when the collector market for that thing dies and it all turns back into paper? Books without a market sometimes find their way into what genteel bookmen call the "curiosa" shelf. Often this stuff is more or less specialized porn or "erotica." Often it's just too weird to fit into whatever system the buyer has; for example, the C.F. Russell booklets would find their way here unless the store knew an enormous amount about such things. And sometimes it will be both weird and what you could call porn, which is to say it exerted some kind of libidinal power over its owner at one point as a talismanic object, a beloved thing of more or less intimate fantasy, but isn't the normative naked lady sort of thing. Children's books often have the earmarks of this when you find them in either really good or really bad condition, but children's books are also a well-recognized market and so their fascination is pretty normalized. Same with comic books or 50s crime paperbacks or science fiction for that matter. A true curio's value is more obscure. Sometimes you can puzzle it out from provenance -- even a scissored-out carpet ad becomes a numinous relic if it was owned by Francis Bacon or, again, Joseph Cornell -- but often biographical cues are absent or dead ends. Yard sale fans are good at sniffing this stuff out before it falls back through the cracks of the world. What are your curios? What will happen to them when you're gone? In other news I think the work of Joel-Peter Witkin [pictured above: Costumed Inmate, Insane Asylum] still has things to teach me, although it isn't what I was getting out of it twenty years ago. Current Music: "Out of the Blue (Hey Hey My My)," Neil Young (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
12:31 pm	Deboxing Miranda Spent most of the year so far hunting the semantic web, which seems to be the carrier of a lot of gnostic ambition these days. It's really the old story of the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony -- heaven & earth magic properly understood -- with the inevitable submissions, sublimations, translation, transubstantiation of the world on the way to the ideal. It's one of the few directions in which money is still moving, and that's interesting. In theory it's one of the last-ditch hopes for money, and in practice really always has been. Joseph Cornell, "Nymphlight" (still) Naturally the world is what keeps on happening when you've been hunting the ideal and so there's an elegiac quality. All my favorite restaurants are basically gone: Marions Continental where the Pontani "sisters" danced and tiki season came once a year with rum drinks and summer jackets, Florent on the Gansevoort, Shiki with his fluorescent paper cuts, Two Boots with its midnight movies, Galaxy and its glitter decals under formica, Devil Moon for the girls together outrageously, Bendix even though they were yankees fans, Kiev, the Coral Room... finis gloria mundi, slipping out of the world while the semantic web was coming in, now relegated to a fragmentary half-light state, neither taggable nor forgotten. Restaurants are like pets. They rarely live as long as we do, but we let ourselves forget until one of those uncommon economic plague years takes all your favorites at once. Someone like a William Gibson or a Joseph Cornell or a Tin Woodsman will find pleasure in memorializing the irreplaceable tangibles that are constantly one step ahead on the road to disappearing. We build these little boxes like blog posts and when they're well made they don't exactly "resist" the melt into light as much as they do not succumb. They aren't tagged, but the very fact they're electric makes them as immortal as anything else in the brave new world. The Woodsman's plush heart may not beat but it reminds him how it felt. The Tessier-Ashpool entities left their boxmaker behind to mark the exit & bait the trap; we all do. Harry Smith, "The Tin Woodsman's Dream" (Film 16, still) And of course there are surprises on the way as the proverbial first baby continues to laugh. I had a run-in with my own mad (possibly Belgian) ad man. The Chelsea Hotel and even the Mars Bar, despite all the bad omens of the last few years, survive. I finally found the plot for the third Adrian Neubis story, the one where Venus makes her argument. It involves current efforts to dig up Leonardo da Vinci to prove that Mona Lisa (overdrive) was just the exteriorization of his skull all along. Hackneyed and overly literal, as Duchamp would say, to simply write off la gioconda as a twisty Italian dressing like his mother "on vacation," but push it five minutes into the future and it raises all kinds of exciting points about fathers & daughters, pigeons & mirrors, Ourania & her origins. Current Music: "Liar's Tale," Guided by Voices (Comment on this)
Friday, January 8th, 2010
6:38 pm	Friday on my Mind Chelsea hasn't changed at all except some of the old haunts are gone. Very interesting Wallace Berman show -- both the "big" verifax grids and the rarely seen "little" single-cell collages live up to their reputation, far more hermetic than the empty buzzword usually entails when people reach to characterize his work. There was a particularly gorgeous variant (איב זח פצ סנ) where he'd assembled celebrities of the era -- the Kennedys, Marilyn, Liz Taylor -- and painted over the faces, leaving the posture, clothes & hair as reference points, but the highlight was probably a full-wall blow-up of the photo that turned into the Mermaid Tavern poster: crouched down executing yet another row of perfect Hebrew semaphore, black paint on white except where a spill forces him to switch to white on black. Now that, as John Zorn once said, is purity, "if you're into purity." Wallace Berman, "Aleph" (still image). Had a pleasant chat with Frau Klagsbrun about the weather and got the Cameron catalog in return. (There is no Berman catalog.) On the train you open the book and suddenly a guy sitting to your left calls a blind girl a whore; the train is taken out of service and we all step across the platform. The girl wanted to take the express, would've rather taken the E instead of the 7. So it goes. Current Music: Easybeats (Comment on this)
Friday, January 1st, 2010
6:18 pm	Blue Moon According to Romeo Muller, there's an endless archipelago where each old year in its turn subsists in a perpetual retirement. "Choose ye an island." Like a lot of poetic images, this is most useful when you invert it (pigeons & mirrors again): if the archipelago of last years did not exist, we would have to invent it by, for example, chalking off a box for each "atoll" to inhabit. I am currently obsessed with Dan Clowes. Once you start filling in the islands there are some basic technical approaches for reorienting your perspective. One of my favorites revolves around the idea that while the past continually recedes, the relationships between historical moments remain relatively intact, so that roughly 15 years will always separate 1995 from both 1980 and 2010, for example. Applying this relatively portable frame to various eras allows you to approximate the maturation and decay of various trends and other cultural entities, not to mention the inflection points around which history appears to speed up or slow down. This in turn liberates the perspective from generational constraints and reinvigorates the past. For example, when we were children, World War I was still roughly 60 years in the past and its traces occupied a certain stratum in contemporary life, had a certain resonance or echo. Nowadays, World War II occupies the same relative position and (barring outside factors) its reverberations should be diminishing at roughly the same rate. When we were children, the ghost of 1958 was roughly 20 years gone, which means that the world of South Pacific or "Great Balls of Fire" was as present for our parents then as Twin Peaks or "Out of Time" is to us now. The Eisenhower recession ... the 1987 crash ... the credit crunch. Today 1958 is barely relevant but they're remaking Wall Street. In 20 years, where will we be? And so and so forth, adjusting for inflection points of course. If everything else is equal, comic book collecting today should be roughly as mature as stamp collecting was around 1910. (And if it isn't, it points to the presence of previously invisible external forces.) This also has a constructive application, as 1958, for example, can be approximately reconstituted as the dot product of all the historical relationships that constitute 2010, only slid back about a half century and holding constant terms constant. The effect is similar to the invention of artificial spatial perspective with its web of gazelines. When you start thinking in these terms it gets easier to put scattered historical accounts in their places -- to navigate the otherwise endless sea of time, memory & junk in search of terra that's firma -- and construct your own. Watch pop coagulate, backward through the bobbysoxers, cylinder recordings, vaudeville, Napoleon, nursery rhymes, commedia, vanishing point ("tradition"). Current Music: REM, "Country Feedback" (Comment on this)
Monday, December 28th, 2009
5:43 pm	The New (Interior) Suns Land of the Mangaboos. Jess, 1955. Oil on burlap. "Your Highness," said he, "I will now proceed to prove my magic by creating two suns that you have never seen before; also I will exhibit a Destroyer much more dreadful that your Clinging Vines." So he placed Dorothy upon one side of him and the boy upon the other and set a lantern upon each of their heads. "Don't laugh," he whispered to them, "or you will spoil the effect of my magic." Then, with much dignity and a look of vast importance upon his wrinkled face, the Wizard got out his match-box and lighted the two lanterns. The glare they made was very small when compared with the radiance of the six great colored suns; but still they gleamed steadily and clearly. The Mangaboos were much impressed. "His fantasies are taken to be not escapes from reality but descents into reality." -- Robert Duncan, "Jack Spicer's One Night Stand & Other Poems" Current Music: Cabaret Voltaire, Yashar (Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
11:03 am	Pigeons & Mirrors As many of you know my long work of capitalist self-immolation was achieved earlier this year and since then I've been reborn (levigate) as a sustainable free agent. So far the main adjustments are psychological. It reminds me of how the Beatles tricked the Vacuum Cleaner Beast into annihilating first the rest of the Sea of Monsters, then itself, leaving them to find their way back through the Sea of Nothing where Martin Amis lives. It is good but the way to Pepperland is often hypnotic. Along these lines I had the great good luck to find a bootleg Krautrocksampler online recently. Projects like this are often mere facile exercises in hipsterism but St. Julian's prose has real verve and so animates insights that would in other hands only drive collector markets. (Cope realizes this.) The best parts are early on when he describes the amnesiac West German kids' efforts to first absorb the mass of American (and then Anglo-American) pop thrown at them, then digest it and finally regurgitate it in a recognizable but still uniquely "German" form. This is of course what happens to your mercury in the rasa shastra system. More immediately interesting, it's also a good example of double reflection, in which crossing the river twice is not equivalent to never having crossed at all but in fact opens up first an inversion and then infinite regress. We saw this earlier with the "haunted" Meek sound, reel-to-reel recordings of the three-minute American symphony played back at us to let the American teenager see its own soda-shop, B-movie, blackboard jungle ghosts from a new angle: John Leyton to the Meteors and ultimately coughing up Rocky Horror, suedehead & the Damned. We saw it again in the nouvelle vague (see last post). "The delicate perfume of sex and leatherette pervades the air, the radios playing new Gene Vincent songs." (Photo credit MadelonTK) It of course is still going on. The "Dark Monarch" evolves England's hidden reverse and vice versa: Britpop like James Brown is dead (undead undead) and as we all know the pound like British Aerospace still swings both ways (like a pendulum do), between and reflecting both the continents. I am not of course a WASP but modern life can still be rubbish (so the story begins / get my crepes suzette). The problem, everyone tells me this week, is storage: data, power, oil, gas, grain, gold. Near-term, remarkably, production is not a concern -- producers can't unload the stuff fast enough. Everyone knows the futures curve is profoundly unbackwardate; it is however also extreme in its current contango. Reverse gold rush, building the pressure of demand: ad men & the art of mirrors. On exhibit in the Court of the Crimson King (St Ives) through January 10 Current Music: Absolute Beginners (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 28th, 2009
6:01 pm	the living & the dead I heckled one of these trailers when it played theatrically. The other holds up OK. Despite disclaimers to the contrary, the differences between them -- their intended audiences, ideological situation, intrinsic interest -- are instructive. Current Music: Chantal Goya (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
12:06 pm	olivia escape Yma Sumac or Amy Camus, another flaming creature has left the planet. Imagine the golden door swinging open, a feather the color of sunlight wafts to the yellow newsprint at the bottom of her cage but the bird herself is gone. Xtabay. That voice is free to go back where it came from, up and up the heart of the Andes. A good omen. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 31st, 2007
11:01 am	not dead; dreaming A festive turn from Ann-Margret for all the beautiful and ugly, old and new people of livejournal and beyond. BOMBASTICUS WILL RETURN in: The Voluptuous Horror of H.P.L. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 15th, 2005
3:58 pm	Squid Versus Whale "You were much more emotional when you were younger." People talk a lot about monsters from the retro deep, but sometimes they still come to the surface. Squid versus whale. It keeps going on. Current Music: "Courting Blues," Bert Jansch (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
8:59 pm	The CHANGE! One of the funniest things I have ever seen was an unsigned sheet of doodling we found back in the files of an art house in Salt Lake City, clearly the workings of an unhinged projectionist. It was a series of little portraits neatly labeled by age – Age 1, staring baby, Age 3, cute tot and so on. The gag was that at intervals the row of heads was interrupted by a caption “THE CHANGE!” and then when the dating resumed the person would have gone through puberty, changed sex, became maniacal, grown an extra eye, mutated into a hippo or whatever. Between CHANGEs, the aging process went on as normal but the heads got smaller as they got closer to the bottom of the page. I seem to remember it ending with panel after panel of tiny hippo skulls (Age 245 … Age 257 … Age 269). My God, that was the best cartooning I’ve ever seen. This was especially amusing for me because we had THE CHANGE in my high school too, only we called it the science of climacterics. This has since been turned into genre fiction by John Crowley but the basic idea was that the typical person goes through long-wave cycles that take you from crisis to peak every 14 years. I am not a big fan of this theory but people around me find it funny so I laugh along. Actually this is all preliminary for a POLL! ( Read more... ) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 26th, 2005
12:06 pm	The Importance of Being Yma I first heard the Voice of the Xtabay about 20 years ago when, primed by a throwaway reference in an H.P. Lovecraft tribute anthology (at one point alien prog rock is compared to "Yma Sumac...that freak South American singer a few years ago"), I had the frankly bizarre good luck to find the original EP in the local flea market, a place where you could get Navaho food, hand-carved chess tables and other fern-bar gothic furniture trucked up from Mexico, and piles of Ballantine adult fantasy paperbacks priced at fifty cents. They undoubtedly had a lot of other stuff there as well but I was still young and relatively stupid. Anyway, if her voice was anywhere near Lovecraftian, I had to hear it for myself. Besides, the album was already 35 years old! A collector's item! So I threw it on there with a lot of the weirdly bloodless crap I thought I should like at the time (Chad & Jeremy, June Tabor and even, dear reader, a Sinatra record) and took a listen. It was satisfyingly exotic, conjuring a landscape of Inca rituals, mythology, lost Peruvian princesses and all that Nicky Roerich stuff . . . often in Spanish so I wasn't terribly interested. That stuff, I could get down the block, but the antediluvian culture behind the Spanish, the lost civilization where the girls could sing like birds, pictures were painted in the color of sunlight and anima menaces were calling like sirens from every mountain peak, that was exciting: The Xtabay is the most elusive of all women. You seek her in your flight of desire and think of her as beautiful as the morning sun touching the highest mountain peak. Her voice calls to you in every whisper of the wind. The lure of her unknown love becomes ever stronger, and a virgin who might have consumed your nights with tender caresses now seems less than the dry leaves of winter. For you follow the call of the Xtabay...though you walk alone through all your days. That's from the record jacket but was quoted in FATE magazine, which only demonstrates that Yma's fan base and the Lovecraft people were often found drinking in the same bars. A few years later, at school, we would blast this album and the Singing Nun as a kind of sonic warfare (this would later become much more sophisticated), but then again we did a lot of dumb things like get really drunk and dance to the national anthem of Finland or whatever, all this weird junior united nations gone bad type stuff. And that's when I heard that Yma Sumac didn't really exist, she was just a Jewish girl from Brooklyn (the details always vary slightly) named Amy Camus, a failed opera singer who reversed her name for publicity. Since the "xtabay" is actually a Mayan legend (a long walk from Peru) and a cunning pig-latin anagram for Les "Baxter," god of exotica, there's some circumstantial evidence for this. But then, dear reader, who was "Moises Vivanco," the debonair Indiana Jones of bandleaders who (legend has it) called the princess down from the mountain and eventually married her (twice)? Was he from Brooklyn too? Another of the masks of Baxter? To be honest, it doesn't interest me so much which side of the mirror Yma/amY came from as what's been on her mind since then. Why did she drop out of sight in America after making only a handful of records and a few movies? Did her "unusually constructed" mutant throat finally give out? Why did she do most of her work in the '60s behind the Iron Curtain? What were they aiming at, the impersonation of the gods or just a quick marketing hook? At what point did the act become real, if it wasn't always thus? At this point, the people who knew the secrets are dead or in relative seclusion -- the truth is slipping away and matters less and less to the world it leaves behind. At the end, all that will be left is those four- or five-octave recordings in some language that claims to be court Quechua. That amazing throat was real. So much has been said about the girls over the years, but we have never found an answer. It didn't matter in the end how old they were, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling: still do not hear us calling them from out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together. Current Music: "Xtabay," Yma Sumac (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 24th, 2005
9:07 pm	Little Gidding I had the funniest dream that I’d gotten really old. I moved slow and with deliberate ennui. My brain was clogged with all the details about synthetic derivatives and politics and God knows what pointless minutia. Oh yeah, the difficulty of wringing returns out of a flattening yield curve. And I spent all day staring at a monitor when I wasn't doing meetings and when I wasn’t doing that, I only fell for incredibly strict and career-oriented girls! Scary! On the other hand, in the dream they’d brought the wheezing under control, maybe because old people don’t, you know, actually suffer from juvenile complaints. By the itching of my chin, keep the outside from the in. It’s lucky the back-to-school weather snapped me out of it so I can get on with the awfully big adventure, Tink. The fire and the rose and the convertible paper are one. Which is to say the enemy Hook is your father the banker in drag, and that's the secret. This uncommon solvent enables the natural gold to be reincruded, softened and restored to its original state in a saline, friable and very fusible form. This is the rejuvenation of the king, described by all the authors: the beginning of a new evolutionary phase, personified in the motif we are considering by Tristan, nephew of King Mark. In fact the uncle and the nephew are, chemically speaking, one and the same thing; of the same kind and similar in origin. . . . Truly it is a strange place, this forest of Mort-Roi, and how like it is to the fabulous and wonderful Garden of the Hesperides! – Mystery of the Cathedrals Stay awake! Current Music: "Jaded," Aerosmith (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 16th, 2005
8:53 am	Bright Stars and ... Guitars and ... (Things We Love) Shout-out to the MURMAIDS for providing the subject line to this post. By now the girls are in their late 50s. What do they look like now? Maybe you pass one every day. Maybe they died young. The lovely and talented shideem put me on her list to say ten things that bring me a moment of joy. At first I wanted to just copy down the lyrics from this guy's hilariously spaced-out cover [click on "listen to MP3s" -- it works okay even on dial-up] of Tom T. Hall's equally goofy (but apparently sincere) song "I Love" but while it does sum up my philosophy pretty well, it would probably alienate people. You be the judge! 1. Being of use. Sue me. 2. Tabbouli. Eat it in bulk. Eat it together. Eat it for peace. 3. Hypnotizing moppets with common household crap (aka "the spatula game"). 4. Walking long distances. I still want to do Albany. 5. Colors mostly found in tweed. Just for a change, give me oxblood, midnight, moss, charcoal. 6. Zooey Deschanel! She plays ukelele! 7. The last eight minutes of the movie Orlando. But only those minutes. 8. Eating museum food with the old ladies. They know my scam, they just don't care. 9. Opening the windows in spring. Ah, the week of perfume and skirts. 10. Leaving the windows open in fall. The air turned to smoke and tannin. I think 7654321b, eestiplika, flamewalker, jearl, myblueheron, sagasdraumr, tigbitties and tommygirlk (among others) would produce interesting answers but anyone can play. Current Music: "I Love," Tom Heinl (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 13th, 2005
8:50 am	Greetings to the New Brunette Once again it's the kind of September when you were a young and callow fellow the grass is green and grain is yellow and school is back in session. The kids are back at NYU in their hordes, leading clumps of dizzy parents down the sidwalks like goldfish gasping on a leash, making me feel fleetingly but still absurdly like Pnin without the bowl. And the lingering morning and the quickening evening are the day. This is one of my favorite times of the year. Whenever I get together with the new music crowd, you can bet the conversation will end up revolving around three main poles: pedagogy, a compositional technique called "Robot Shakespeare" and my own climacterics. (The movie Conan: The Barbarian gets honorary mention depending on how drunk people get.) This weekend was a perfect example. Consensus is that the lack of accountability around NOLA is rooted in a failure of ethical education -- and that necessarily includes training to recognize the limits of the ego, that is, training in critical thinking. Instead, the public system provides no real ethical training (church and state, after all) and the home-school platforms make things worse by pretending to offer ethics but only pouring morality instead like lard down their little throats in the form of beginner books for the soul. Fat pigeons. Then on the way to the museum there was a belated labor day parade up Fifth Avenue and I wondered what happened to the American flags and the bikers with their eagle jackets. The answer is that the failure of universal education robbed the cadres of their natural leadership. In the museum proper I saw the Millets and thought about the correlation between the narcotic sentimentality of the 1840s and the economic collapse underneath it. And I finally scored the first hunk of Tony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time [see also], repeating my ancient pattern of connecting with something crucial in the world of literature at exactly the moment where it will wreak maximum havoc with my work habits. It is currently in the stack mocking me, waiting for its moment to unhinge. And as last week's simultaneous scalp and heel wounds (!) heal, I've stabilized somewhere around 1986, staying up far too late on a school night to watch 120 Minutes so I could learn what the kids in Europe were up to three, four, five years previous. Which makes me wonder why nobody ever plays Billy Bragg any more, Here we are in our summer years Living on ice cream and chocolate kisses Would the leaves fall from the trees If I was your old man and you were my missus Shirley, Give my greetings to the new brunette Current Music: "Greetings to the New Brunette," Billy Bragg (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
1:11 pm	Last Days of Disco Man, did McClellan just lose it on the live feed or what? This is above, if not his pay grade, his expertise. UPDATES: Feed did in fact just cut out suddenly "as though someone kicked out a power cord." Greenspan Lunch is being spun in weird and bizarre ways, much more cheerful than earlier indicated (although we're going to be buying European gas grades wholesale?! is that how desperate they are?). DHS Czar "Ask the White House" PR event turned out to be expected soft fluff but unexpectedly terse, again understandable -- given the amount of work his office should be doing this week, why even have it? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 29th, 2005
4:01 pm	Age of Aquarius "We had a much better time in those days than the movie reflects," says Guthrie. "They made the movie to show how valiant our attempt was to create a . . . new world." But because the filmmakers didn't believe the movement would have any long-term effect, they depicted it as a failure. Alas poor Arlo, what impresses me about Alice's Restaurant is the sensitivity with which Penn captured the transience of the hippies and their essentially children's crusade. This movie came out in 1969, three days after Woodstock let out, and the Stones were already slouching toward Altamont. The characters know that they've already run out of time: if only they'd bought the church sooner, Alice says early on, maybe Arlo wouldn't have wandered off for so long, they would have kept their happy little clan together. But they buy the church, Arlo comes back and everything seems to go fine -- for a little while, until Shelly comes (back) with heroin on his mind and busts the scene up. Okay, Diane Linkletter melodrama, everybody mourns. But then Ray, aging beat turned paterfamilias, has two startling visions, drunk off his ass at his own wedding. First, he dreams of his hippie clan filling the church with helium and evacuating the dying earth like a rubber balloon into the sky, wherefrom they will rain flowers on the squares below "to remind them that happiness is possible" or something like that. Okay, everybody can dig that; that sounds fun. Impractical, allegorical maybe, but fun. And then he decides to sell the church and "buy a couple hundred acres up in Vermont, sweet land." Alice, his new bride and co-owner of the church, immediately stops having fun, but Ray continues: if only they'd bought land in the first place, maybe Shelly wouldn't have had such trouble. If only ... then maybe. And Pat Quinn as Alice puts in a wordless performance so worthy of Katherine Ross that I am ashamed for the Internet that there are no pictures available for me to show you. Know a good thing when you got it, Ray, you dumbass. You have plenty of room in that church to shelter plenty hippies. Don't go wandering off again, but they always do. Meanwhile, of course, Arlo's real father Woody has died. Separately I am aggravated to see that the Mothman movie jacked up the price of John Keel's books, especially the epochal Eighth Tower, which I find myself wanting a new working copy of but $100 for a yellowing Signet paperback is really outrageous. Did anyone actually see that movie? Current Music: "Don't Fear the Reaper," Caesars Palace (awful!!) (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 28th, 2005
10:38 am	Songs to Aging Children Come GIRL: I dig Bach. ARLO: I happen to dig music, but I don't know too much about him. GIRL: You should have gone to a better school. Today I have to ponder the emerging nanotech tools space (it's important to sell shovels and blue jeans to those North Sea scientists panning matter for flecks of valuable stuff), talk about exciting developments in the world of exchange-traded mutual fund products and also train for a double-plus-insanity thing I might be doing. The local sushi cartel is also having a matsuri at noon and then old man Mekas is having a Harry Smith double feature. So naturally the Sundance Channel in one of its few fits of competence throws on Alice's Restaurant and I am momentarily distracted by the complex portrait of the rise and fall of hippie civilization, with all its exposed brick folkie coffeehouses, big kitchens, 13-year-old diseased groupies, deconsecrated churches, brocade funerals. Naturally I have got to get out of the house and am heading to the southern fried lesbian brunch dive I love so much because it always smells like a week at my aunt's. I'll update this later, y'all, with some pondering about hippies. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 25th, 2005
1:23 pm	These Our "Current" Middle Ages "In the 1960s and early 1970s, the era of the last great hiring frenzy, departments of English, French, foreign languages, art history, and history in even medium-sized universities had at least one medievalist -- English departments often two or three -- and even small colleges had a sprinkling of medievalists. Most institutions took on board scholars working in the Middle Ages, and it is exactly those people who are now approaching retirement." -- Richard W. Unger, "Medievalists, Demography, and the Next Decade," Medieval Academy News (July 2003) I enjoy the quasi-holy sense in which primarily New York-based writers in the 1960s and early 1970s held the Cloisters and by extension the world of chivalry and quests. How and why did they form such an opinion of that era? What power over their hearts did it hold? When and why did its attraction wax and wane? While the evolution of academic visions of the Middle Ages is fascinating and everyone loves the Kelmscott scene that gave us everything from the Rossettis to Peter Warlock, today I'm more interested in the immediate origins of the "medieval" as a middlebrow American genre. Our knights and damsels are very different from the ones Howard Pyle or even Hal Foster illustrated back before the war, and then during the 1950s we were too busy watching the skies or playing Cowboys & Indians. This post deliberately ignores Umberto Eco, fine though his work may otherwise be. Instead it wallows in American bestsellers and global cinema of the 1960s and 70s, the era of that last great hiring frenzy. At the moment I am also not particularly interested in the "fantasy" or "hippie" genres separate from the "medieval" per se. ( Notes toward a timeline ) Current Music: "Medieval," James (Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 24th, 2005
2:43 pm	At the Movies ( Pick ten movies, find pictures, pass it on! ) (9 Comments |Comment on this)