Friday, June 27, 2003
BIG TIME ROCK AND ROLL TONIGHT
I got off to a strong start, but I've been malingering away from computers too much these days to be able to write anything. In fact, if you want to know the truth, I've been operating solely through the library system, as I have no working computer myself. Mine froze months ago and I was in too much of a academic frenzy to let it slow me down. Well hell, both tires of my bike went flat last winter and I still haven't fixed that yet. I'm really lazy, all right? So now I'm finally around to dealing with the quality of life issues that got shoved aside in the stretch run of my college life. That's the way I'm spinning it anyways. One day, when I get the old boy up and running again, I'll have that all-hours blogging access that I've dreamt of for 40 years, just get crazy with it, get on down as they would say, in songs and dreams perforce.
Well, what can I tell you, it's the shrinking hours before gig time, I'm in a transitory world right now, trying to keep cool, trying to contain my anxiety. Anything is liable to come out of my - well I was going to say mouth but actually I'm being very quiet, you only hear the banging of my keys. I once said "Get on down" in a song, that song being "Hispanics on TV", which was written on Easter Sunday 1979. The line in it's entirety reads:
"Get down/Get on down"
The "on" would be stretched out long, more like "on---------" and then "down" at the end, like it was a Donny Hathaway record or something. That's probably where I lifted it from, or one of those Temptations albums produced by Norman Whitfield. There's one, if you can find it, called "1990" and the title cut starts out with the whole band, apparently, getting hassled by the Man, thrown up against the wall and being called racial epithets and searched and yelled at, "SPREAD EAGLE!" And the Temptations are talking shit and then one of them says finally,
"Hey man, be cool, we ain't did nuthin', this spose to be America, jive-----"
Then they start singing, "There's trouble in the White House/poverty in the ghetto" and on like that until the chorus, where despite their rage at the system, they profess their undying love for their country,
"America, don't get me wrong, I still love ya
Despite all your troubles at home
You're still the greatest of them all."
It's very moving although I could never figure out why they called it 1990, except maybe in 1972 it seemed really far away. Then on the flip side is this long jam called "Zoom" where they spend the first several minutes of the song discussing space travel and doing it in a very funky fashion, if you know what I mean, rapping about UFO's, all the while this clock is ticking in the background, and suddenly the Temptations realize they're being abducted or something. They start shouting "What's that noise?" and then succumb to their fate:
"Where we going man?"
"To get it together."
And the one with the basso voice is counting down, "Ten-nine-eight-seven..." until
"Zoom! We're on our way to the moon!"
And it goes on like this for about 12 minutes. Well, when I was a kid I listened to this kind of stuff. My brother would bring it home and I would get really into it. Funkedelic was even better. Imagine hearing the album "Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow" for the first time.
Well, my time here is at an end. It's out to rock and roll tonight, with no less a band than The Controllers, a band that I have only seen on fliers, really old ones, with bands like D.I. and all that. We'll see if they still got it. We'll see if we still got it. We've played some real hoots at Liquid Den. But I'm really interested in seeing D-Cup - I mean with a name like that they better not be a bunch of butt ugly dudes, that's all I gotta say.
I got off to a strong start, but I've been malingering away from computers too much these days to be able to write anything. In fact, if you want to know the truth, I've been operating solely through the library system, as I have no working computer myself. Mine froze months ago and I was in too much of a academic frenzy to let it slow me down. Well hell, both tires of my bike went flat last winter and I still haven't fixed that yet. I'm really lazy, all right? So now I'm finally around to dealing with the quality of life issues that got shoved aside in the stretch run of my college life. That's the way I'm spinning it anyways. One day, when I get the old boy up and running again, I'll have that all-hours blogging access that I've dreamt of for 40 years, just get crazy with it, get on down as they would say, in songs and dreams perforce.
Well, what can I tell you, it's the shrinking hours before gig time, I'm in a transitory world right now, trying to keep cool, trying to contain my anxiety. Anything is liable to come out of my - well I was going to say mouth but actually I'm being very quiet, you only hear the banging of my keys. I once said "Get on down" in a song, that song being "Hispanics on TV", which was written on Easter Sunday 1979. The line in it's entirety reads:
"Get down/Get on down"
The "on" would be stretched out long, more like "on---------" and then "down" at the end, like it was a Donny Hathaway record or something. That's probably where I lifted it from, or one of those Temptations albums produced by Norman Whitfield. There's one, if you can find it, called "1990" and the title cut starts out with the whole band, apparently, getting hassled by the Man, thrown up against the wall and being called racial epithets and searched and yelled at, "SPREAD EAGLE!" And the Temptations are talking shit and then one of them says finally,
"Hey man, be cool, we ain't did nuthin', this spose to be America, jive-----"
Then they start singing, "There's trouble in the White House/poverty in the ghetto" and on like that until the chorus, where despite their rage at the system, they profess their undying love for their country,
"America, don't get me wrong, I still love ya
Despite all your troubles at home
You're still the greatest of them all."
It's very moving although I could never figure out why they called it 1990, except maybe in 1972 it seemed really far away. Then on the flip side is this long jam called "Zoom" where they spend the first several minutes of the song discussing space travel and doing it in a very funky fashion, if you know what I mean, rapping about UFO's, all the while this clock is ticking in the background, and suddenly the Temptations realize they're being abducted or something. They start shouting "What's that noise?" and then succumb to their fate:
"Where we going man?"
"To get it together."
And the one with the basso voice is counting down, "Ten-nine-eight-seven..." until
"Zoom! We're on our way to the moon!"
And it goes on like this for about 12 minutes. Well, when I was a kid I listened to this kind of stuff. My brother would bring it home and I would get really into it. Funkedelic was even better. Imagine hearing the album "Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow" for the first time.
Well, my time here is at an end. It's out to rock and roll tonight, with no less a band than The Controllers, a band that I have only seen on fliers, really old ones, with bands like D.I. and all that. We'll see if they still got it. We'll see if we still got it. We've played some real hoots at Liquid Den. But I'm really interested in seeing D-Cup - I mean with a name like that they better not be a bunch of butt ugly dudes, that's all I gotta say.
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
MR. P AT LARGE
While I'm waiting for an hour to pass so that I can continue to send out mass emails to the D-Squad email list (which I'm doing because the Hotmail hyperlinks aren't working for everyone, which just goes to show you), I figure I'd muse about a subject or two, as I gear up for a long ramble on Elite Reputation Builders and the role they play in the music industry. So we're just flying off the wall here:
Andrew Sullivan, the popular blog pundit, is among those who are dissing on the New Blogger, and he blames new corporate owner Google. So I guess I'm not the only one whining about it.
How many times has a man had to put up with this line: "Men always leave the toilet seat up!" like it was the biggest sin known to man (or woman) kind. Yet I never hear anyone bitch about using the toilet after a woman and the whole damn bowl is filled with a half a roll of toilet paper. Is all this waste necessary? And has anyone ever heard of flushing after you're done? (note: the link provided is just an example, and done by crazy Britons)
Men, of course, are no better. If anyone believes that Americans are just plain stupid, or if anyone dares to defend them in the wake of this allegation, I would direct them to public restrooms and beseech them to look for tissue thrown in a urinal. Let's think about this for a second. The function of a urinal, I would think, is fairly cut and dried: you piss in it, period. Even though my friend Gil Gonzales swears he once saw a turd in a urinal, I think just about every toilet-trained man in the country understands what is going on with these devices - if you have to take a dump, you use a toilet, if not, a urinal. Last I checked, there is absolutely no reason to retain a tissue if you are using a urinal. Last I checked, no tissue dispenser is found next to, or even close by, a urinal. I never have, nor do I know of anyone, who needs to use a tissue to wipe off extra urine dripping from your human faucet. Usually a few good shakes do the trick and, after all, there is always this thing called a sink, where you go to wash your hands after each and every time you use the bathroom. Plus, there is the engineering angle. Unlike a standard toilet, which has a huge hole that flushes your waste matter into the sewer, and can accomodate tissue (but not paper towels), if you look at a urinal all you will find are a number of tiny holes, only big enough to accomodate liquid substances and nothing else. Apparently though, this fact escapes the men who somehow wind up with tissue and use it and throw it in the urinal where it stays until the janitor comes in at night and gets it out of there. In an extreme situation, it can clog up the urinal. So, the question begs - who the hell are these brainiacs who are putting tissue in the urinal? It's not a "class" thing - I've seen it in fast food restaurants, I've seen it in colleges, I've seen it in baseball stadiums. Anywhere there is a urinal there seems to be a man who just does not have the baldest clue what the hell is going on. Is it the same man, on a mission to pollute every urinal in the country with tissue and ignorance? If not, what kind of vehicles do the men drive - Hummers, Mini-Coops, souped-up Hondas, Caprice Classics? Do these men vote? What do they base their information on? It's a puzzlement to me and something I will take up again, you can be assured of that.
Not that I like to brag about sitting around my house doing nothing but Sunday night I was watching the James Bond movie "Live and Let Die" on Channel 13 and during the breaks they kept calling it the "Friday movie." And UPN wonders why it's the rock and roll of TV.
While I'm waiting for an hour to pass so that I can continue to send out mass emails to the D-Squad email list (which I'm doing because the Hotmail hyperlinks aren't working for everyone, which just goes to show you), I figure I'd muse about a subject or two, as I gear up for a long ramble on Elite Reputation Builders and the role they play in the music industry. So we're just flying off the wall here:
Andrew Sullivan, the popular blog pundit, is among those who are dissing on the New Blogger, and he blames new corporate owner Google. So I guess I'm not the only one whining about it.
How many times has a man had to put up with this line: "Men always leave the toilet seat up!" like it was the biggest sin known to man (or woman) kind. Yet I never hear anyone bitch about using the toilet after a woman and the whole damn bowl is filled with a half a roll of toilet paper. Is all this waste necessary? And has anyone ever heard of flushing after you're done? (note: the link provided is just an example, and done by crazy Britons)
Men, of course, are no better. If anyone believes that Americans are just plain stupid, or if anyone dares to defend them in the wake of this allegation, I would direct them to public restrooms and beseech them to look for tissue thrown in a urinal. Let's think about this for a second. The function of a urinal, I would think, is fairly cut and dried: you piss in it, period. Even though my friend Gil Gonzales swears he once saw a turd in a urinal, I think just about every toilet-trained man in the country understands what is going on with these devices - if you have to take a dump, you use a toilet, if not, a urinal. Last I checked, there is absolutely no reason to retain a tissue if you are using a urinal. Last I checked, no tissue dispenser is found next to, or even close by, a urinal. I never have, nor do I know of anyone, who needs to use a tissue to wipe off extra urine dripping from your human faucet. Usually a few good shakes do the trick and, after all, there is always this thing called a sink, where you go to wash your hands after each and every time you use the bathroom. Plus, there is the engineering angle. Unlike a standard toilet, which has a huge hole that flushes your waste matter into the sewer, and can accomodate tissue (but not paper towels), if you look at a urinal all you will find are a number of tiny holes, only big enough to accomodate liquid substances and nothing else. Apparently though, this fact escapes the men who somehow wind up with tissue and use it and throw it in the urinal where it stays until the janitor comes in at night and gets it out of there. In an extreme situation, it can clog up the urinal. So, the question begs - who the hell are these brainiacs who are putting tissue in the urinal? It's not a "class" thing - I've seen it in fast food restaurants, I've seen it in colleges, I've seen it in baseball stadiums. Anywhere there is a urinal there seems to be a man who just does not have the baldest clue what the hell is going on. Is it the same man, on a mission to pollute every urinal in the country with tissue and ignorance? If not, what kind of vehicles do the men drive - Hummers, Mini-Coops, souped-up Hondas, Caprice Classics? Do these men vote? What do they base their information on? It's a puzzlement to me and something I will take up again, you can be assured of that.
Not that I like to brag about sitting around my house doing nothing but Sunday night I was watching the James Bond movie "Live and Let Die" on Channel 13 and during the breaks they kept calling it the "Friday movie." And UPN wonders why it's the rock and roll of TV.
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