iPod wit

I've been startled at how seemingly smart and cognizant the "Shuffle Songs" function is on my iPod. Yesterday on the way home from work, iPod actually made me laugh (yes, I call it "iPod"). Following John Coltrane's "Acknowledgment" from A Love Supreme - a totally intense and spiritual song with Coltrane chanting the words "a love supreme" over and over again - came Samuel L. Jackson's Ezekiel 25-17 monologue from Pulp Fiction. "And you will KNOW that my name is THE LORD when I lay my VENGEANCE upon thee."

iPod is hilarious.

Félix Fénéon

Luc Sante's introduction to his translation of Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines includes some examples of these three-line "novels" or faits-divers. Here are a few:

Responding to a call at night, M. Sirvent, café owner of Caissargues, Gard, opened his window; a rifle shot destroyed his face.

The schoolchildren of Niort were being crowned. The chandelier fell, and the laurels of three among them were spotted with a little blood.

At five o'clock in the morning, M.P. Bouget was accosted by two men on Rue Fondary. One put out his right eye, the other his left. In Necker.

A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.

Finding his daughter, 19, insufficiently austere, Jallat, watchmaker of Saint-Étienne, killed her. It is true that he has eleven children left.

These brief striking and grotesque pieces are comparable and bear a strong resemblance to the song summaries that Harry Smith created for each song he included in his Anthology of American Folk Music. A few examples:


For "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O" (a version of "Froggie Went A-Courtin'") - Zoologic miscegeny achieved in mouse frog nuptuals, relatives approve.


For "Ommie Wise" - Greedy girl goes to Adams Spring with liar; lives just long enough to regret it.

For "Kassie Jones" - Crack engineer Jones in fatal collision. Knew Alice Fry. Wife recalls symbolic dream, later consoles children.


For "Old Shoes and Leggins" - Mother hospitable, but girls find shoddy oldster's actions perverse.


Works by both of these writers show a flair for the newspaper headline, but also demonstrate how these one-liners can convey the universe working through self-imposed restrictions.

"Don't swallow, Bill Murray"

Great scene from Jim Jarmusch's Coffee & Cigarettes:

More Creep Juice

This toothless drifter was outside my office window making notes.

Leg Found in Smoker

Talk about old, weird America...

N.C. Man Talks After Someone Finds His Foot In A Smoker

Thursday, Sep 27, 2007 - 12:34 PM Updated: 01:01 PM

By Carrie Davis

John Wood takes to the driving range at Furman University's golf course. The amputee is in the Upstate to raise money for Roger. C. Peace Hospital-Rehabilitation. He lost his leg three years ago in a plane crash and he says that's just one of the many hurdles life has thrown at him. Wood says, "I have had a hard life this is my second plane crash. I have been in two plane crashes, shot, run over by a state dump truck, electrocuted. I have been through a lot."

John has a good attitude, but with that track record something else was bound to happen.

That's where Shannon Whisnant comes in. He bought John's old smoker at auction when john failed to pay the rent on a storage unit, but what Shannon Whisnant didn't buy was the surprise inside. When he saw it he immediately called 911.

Disptach: "What's the problem there?"

Caller: "I got a human foot."

Disptach: "Have a what?"

Caller: "A human left foot."

Disptach: "What's your name?"

Caller: "My name is Shannon Whisnant and its plum nasty got me grossed out."

That's right, in the smoker was John's old foot and part of his leg. The question is why? Wood claims, "I had some spiritual beliefs that I wanted to be cremated whole, so I had my leg preserved. I hate it for everybody I told them not to go in there after that leg you know."

So what happened to the lost limb? Whisnant says he wants to make the most of his money. Shannon Whisnant says, "I thought about pursuing the foot just as a conversation piece religious or not put it in an air tight box with a glass window on it."

Of course John hopes he'll get his body part back. Wood says, "I asked the police department when they called me and told me that my leg was sold at public auction and I asked the police department that called me its not on impound is it? "

The police in Maidan, North Carolina say they do plan to give John his leg back.

Old Weird Harry

Here's Harry Smith, the compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music. This man could tell you what county you were from based on the version of "Barbara Allen" you knew...

Heroic

"Songs are supposed to be heroic enough to give the illusion of stopping time." - Bob Dylan, 1985

Louie Louie

This You Tube clip claims to be the true lyrics to Louie Louie. Sure, whatever. The song, of course, is terrific, but the the video text here is so laughably simple that it seems to be commenting on this laughably simple/brilliant song.

The Golden Age

The following in an excerpt from W.B. Yeats's story The Golden Age:

A man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.

God Bless Chris Rock

Salon quoted (and now Saturday Night Live) Chris Rock that the country may be ready for Barack Obama in the White House, "Is America ready for an African American president? I say, why not. We just had a retarded president!"

One More Story of the Sea

A postscript to the compilation Stories of the Sea is this track from that old sea dog Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Billy once released an entire record of instrumental sea chanteys. He returns to the sea for inspiration time and again.

This song comes from a performance in Scotland (I believe) combining Is It the Sea? with My Home is the Sea to create a haunting and triumphant tale and sound. It's worth the time to download and listen. Download here.

Creep Juice

This week I traveled to Raleigh for a conference and visited the North Carolina Museum of Art for the first time. A number of memorable works from Joseph Cornell, Ed Ruscha, Daisy Youngblood and much more.

Though I've never been an enormous fan of Andrew Wyeth, this painting's enduring creepiness continues to haunt me. From the ghostly images in the upper left window to sheet pushed out of the upper right window looking like the head of a crazed ram, it's damned spooky. What doesn't translate in this scanned image is the placid water in the can in the foreground of the painting and the clothesline dividing the image in two.

The Geography of Sound

The following is an excerpt from a lecture titled The Geography of Sound by David Thomas, the former leader of the band Pere Ubu:

Ike Turner's Rocket 88 from 1951, frequently cited as the first out n out rock n roll recording, is about a car and a car is about space. The car is a form of poetic meter, only suburbanites and soccer moms think of it as transportation. A windshield frames the Big Out There in wide-screen, cinemascopic proportions while the car has a radio that frames a broadcast signal which in turn frames a recording which is in itself a complex of frames within frames, wheels within wheels, and all the while you yourself in either of the heavily symbolic roles of Driver or Passenger are navigating across a no-doubt wacked landscape from within this resonating soundscape frame-container and all the scales are fracturing very artistically and the gyroscope of your sixth body sense is flipping around getting pleasantly confused as to what exactly is the distinction between internal and external geographies... and that's what they used to call "Cruising." And in Old America the real artists did not work with marble or paint or even cine film, the real artist was a slob with a pint of oil and a set of spark plug wrenches.