"What button you wear says a lot. People can immediately tell if they might have something in common with you. They may detect a personality quirk that intrigues them, they might even be able to tell whether or not you're worth bothering with." -(Creem, May 1980)
Flipping through an old May 1980 ish of Creem magazine, I saw this photo spread about rock 'n' roll buttons (or "badges" in Brit parlance) and it brought back cheery memories of the phenonenon's sharp-edged Punk/New Wave heyday during the late '70s/early '80s. Between us, I think my ex-wife and I had all of these buttons at one time or another. (Hey, I even still have the Boy Howdy t-shirt!)
I was always partial to the real tiny pins, like Elvis Costello's eensie-weensie "Get Happy!" badge or the one with his angry mug glaring out of a bright red button. Other faves included "If It's Lene's You'll Lovich!,""Shut Up and Dance" (there was also a "Fuck Art Let's Dance" pin), "Rude Boy,""Rude Girl" ( a good gender-bender button when worn on a boy), anything by Buzzcocks, and "Back To Mono" (the sonic sound, not the kissing affliction - I still wear this one because I believe in the sentiment; besides, in the pre-digital analog days, many Brit Invasion band LPs sounded much better in mono, as Brian Wilson always knew).
But I did break down and get Devo's oversized Balloon Girl Flicker button (pictured on model's back, below) because, well, flicker buttons sell themselves!
I remember buying most of these buttons either at record stores or at area boutiques catering to the New Wave set like the old Lookinglass (across the street from the Congress Hotel in the H&H Building) or DC's Commander Salamander's.
Now I gotta dig my pin boxes out and see how many I have left.
A Tale of Horrid Hunters & Cloying Collectors I splurged this weekend on gas, Boston Market chicken, and car repairs, so by the time I realized that Sunday was the last day of the Friends of the Towson Library Book Sale at (you guessed it) the Towson Branch of the Baltimore County Public Library, I had but $3 to my name.
I thought that the final day of the Towson Book Sale was one of those all-you-can-fill-a-bag (or box)-with book buffet deals like the (far superior) annual Enoch Pratt Free Library Book Sale, but no such luck in the 'burbs. They have some hokey "by the inch" thing - I think it was $3 for 6-inches or $5 for 12-inches - which sounds either like a male hustler solicitation rate or a Subway sandwich promotion.
But I have enough books, for God's sake, and I work at a library to boot. Besides, I'm trying to sell my house and need to de-clutter years of pop cultural detritus that built up within the rowhome I call "Townhouse Shabby" (to appeal to fans of Downton Abbey shopping for Rodgers Forge homes with, um, "character"!) And so I busied myself pouring over the spread of CDs, which were 2-for-$1. Given my limited math skills (in High School I took Algebra II literally - meaning I took it twice!), I counted my fingers until I finally calculated this would allow me to pick up six CDs with my three bucks.
Luckily, The library volunteer "Friends" had taken the time to roughly sort them by type (all the jazz was in one section, the pop/rock/soul in another, Christmas music here, world/folk there, and so on), and I soon found my six - though I wish I had worn my prescription glasses because I mistakenly picked up the soundtrack to Mel "Son of a Holocaust Denier" Gibson's Passion of the Christ after mistaking it for Peter Gabriel's gorgeous score for Martin Scorcese's The Last Temptation of the Christ, which borders on aesthetic blasphemy to my mind. (For my money, Gibson's only good movies are the ones where he's not acting but just playing himself, a savage yahoo retard. Hence his best work is in Tim , where he plays a retard, and Road Warrior, where he plays a desensitized savage with a muscle car).
My other, less controversial scores were:
1. The Graham Gouldman-Eric Stewart edition of 10cc Live In Concert, Volume Two, a mid-'90s release documenting what they sounded like during their 1993 Japanese Tour (and which includes two Beatles covers - three if you consider their take on "Slow Down" to be the Beatles version). Having just seen a live DVD of Graham Gouldman's 10cc touring band circa 2007, 10cc in Concert, it was good to pick up this edition with Eric Stewart singing most of the vocals.
Go-Kart comp features Balto bands Berserk, Buttsteak and Stress Magnets
I already own a copy, but I figured I'd gift it to my girlfriend Amy so she could listen to our friends Dave Cawley and Skizz Cyzyk rock out on the two Berserk cuts on it: Brent Malkus's "Blue Hearts" - an homage to the '80s Japanese punk-pop band Blue Hearts...
- and Ultraman fanboy Dave's tokosatsu love song "Ultra 7."
Berserk - "Ultra 7"
Berserk - "Ultra 7" live at the Ottobar
The CD (which can currently be found "new" on Amazon for 71 cents!), also contains tracks by two more local bands, Buttsteak and Brent's old band the Stress Magnets. Deal!
Stress Magnets - "Kendall Fell Asleep in the Corn"
4. Four More Years in the Bush Leagues by local political satirists The Capital Steps because, well, the George W. Years were funny as far as logic and common sense goes, if not too funny as far as the economy, 9/11, and all those wasted American lives in the Iraq war fiasco.
Capital Steps - "Four More Years in the Bush Leagues"
5. And, finally,Toolbox Classics by Woody Phillips. The features "handyman" interpretations of classical compositions by the masters (Beethoven, Bach, Bizet, Strauss, , Greig, Wagner, etc.) using instruments you'll never hear at the BSO - like power drills, table saws, pneumatic nailers, hammers, anvils, and plucked jigsaw blades. (A good record to fool my neighbors into thinking I actually have some home improvement skills, though the oustide of my house surely doesn't fool them!)
Though I picked up Toolbox Classics on a whim and strictly as a novelty, it actually works as good, serious music (I call it "Powertool Pop") - albeit using shed tools in place of more traditional instruments. This is especially true of Richard Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (excerpt from Op. 30), in which a drill press motor, table saw, 50-gallon drum, vacuum, and pipes perfectly recreate the dramatic tension of the original - and I'd saw the steady back-and-forth of the table saw even surpasses the original's pounding kettlebell drumming.
But my shopping was disturbed by an ugly book sale incident between a roly-poly, bespectacled and balding Daniel Pinkwater lookalike and an ADD-addled, right-wing capitalist-vulgarian-nitwit who looked like Steven Spielberg and who was scanning every disc with his smart phone scanner to check it's value on the "open market."
Between the two, they had scarfed up most of the CDs on offer as if the discs were the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. These twin OCD shoppers were two prime examples of the collecting "feeding frenzy of excess" so typical of greedy too-much-stuff Consumer-Americans (I used to be one so I caught my reflection, briefly, in their eyes).
The latter had absolutely no taste, of course. When I saw that he had the 10cc CD in his hand, I asked Spielberg with a Scanner, "Oh, are you a fan?" to which he replied, "Nah, I only know the one song." That would be "I'm Not In Love," seemingly the only song anyone (at least this side of the Pond) knows by 10cc, and mostly known (if at all) by a today's generation only thanks to its inclusion on the Virgin Suicides soundtrack. But I can't complain because he gave it to me (thanks dude!) when I told him my girlfriend was a big 10cc fan.
When I looked at Scanner Man's piles my belief in his lack of taste was completely vetted: Eagles, Dr. Hook, John Tesh...I had to look away. It hurt too much. And why, by the way, would anyone bother scanning these CDs in to check their value? These are...rarities? Collectibles? WTF?
Anyway, Pinkwater Man suddenly addressed Steven Spielberg the Tasteless-Clueless Vulgarian with a Scanner, saying "I see you are one of those capitalist collector types who come to these events to try and make a profit and not for love of the music like me. That's why I only buy music to enjoy and not to turn it over and make a profit!"
Steven Spielberg the Tasteless-Clueless Vulgarian with a Scanner scoffed, "You sound like one of those Liberals to me!" Oh Lord, I thought, he's not only got bad taste in music but it extends to talk radio, as he started to sound like one of Rush Limbaugh's ditto heads.
And just like that - woo boy, it was on! Pinkwater should have bitten his tongue, because he didn't realize Spielberg Scanner Man's girlfriend was in "Talk to the Hand" mode and ready to bite his head off.
She was a big gal who looked like a young Whoopi Goldberg and spoke with a West Indies accent. She immediately started yapping at her beloved saying, "It's a good thing he didn't say that to me. If someone say that to me at a Wal-Mart, that shit won't fly. You don't talk here any different from the way you talk at Wal-mart [??? The Library vs. Wal-Mart analogy lost me, I admit; did she think she'd be "Shhhh"-ed by a librarian if she started shit-kicking Pinkwater Man?]. No siree, not without getting in somebody's face and thems dealing with the consequences. You best be ready for a smackdown in that case, you talk like that."
My God, Whoop-ass Whoopi had major anger management issues, because she proceeded to go on until closing time at 5 about this poor, pathetic Pinkwater-esque busy-body with threats of an increasingly violent nature.
"Tell you what, I would stand a person like that on their head and then I'd give them their what-for, yesiree. Stand 'em on their head until the shit come out of their mouth!"
I closed my ears. Jeezus fuck, I thought, why can't people just get along? And why can't this Temper Taliban woman just get over it and let go of the by-now long transpired comment? This is why people get killed for flipping the bird in the highway - no sense of scale or proportion. We're talking about 2-for-a-buck CDS, for Christ's sake! GET OVER IT!
(By the way, her taste was just as atrocious; she thought she was cutting edge because she listened to Nickleback and Limp Bizkit!: "I dunno what the neighbors will think if I buy anymore Nickleback, hon," she cracked to her beloved; um, I would venture they'd think she was every bit as annoying and unimaginative as I found her after about 30 seconds!)
This is why I tend to avoid these book sales now. I like the books and audiovisual materials; it's the greedy OCD people I can't stand!
In closing, I'm gonna shit-can my Mel Gibson soundtrack. After all, the only people who'd probably want it would be Whoop-ass Whoopi and Spielberg the Scanner Man and maybe they can scan for it later at the county dump.
(This is the original post I wrote about some of the more interesting people that frequent the library where I work. A much shorter, edited version will appear later on Pratt's blog site. - TW)
Here at Pratt, we interact with a lot of interesting - even (dare we say) “unusual” – people that frequent the library on a regular basis. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Sights & Sounds (SAS) Department on the main floor of the Central Library.
Not only is this department a busy passageway between the Central Hall lobby and the Annex’s Public Computer Center, but it’s also home to a large collection of both educational and popular entertainment audiovisual materials –everything from fiction audiobooks and music CDs to DVDs of popular television series, Hollywood movies, critically-acclaimed foreign films and award-winning documentaries addressing every conceivable topic.
Naturally, we get lots of people just looking for the latest popular entertainment titles – be it this year’s Oscar-winning movie Argo, the new album by Justin Timberlake, an audiobook version of Fifty Shades of Grey, or the latest season of Downtown Abbey. But we also tend to attract a number of regulars that might best be described as “creative” or “artsy” types - film, music, and literature fanatics that veer off the well-beaten track to traverse the roads less travelled.
Their ranks include local musicians Caleb Stine,Eddie Chabon of The Swingin’ Swamis, and Jason Sageof Telesma; independent filmmaker and Maryland Institute College of Art instructor Allen Moore (a frequent cinematographer for documentarian Ken Burns); Sondheim Award-winning artist and 14-Karat Cabaret performance space founder-curator Laure Drogoul; former John Waters "Dreamlander" cast regular and Orpheum Cinema curator George Figgs; and experimental filmmaker-instructor Karen Yasinsky, to name but a few. We consider them to be not just Pratt patrons, but our friends as well. But not everyone is a celebrity. Some of our most frequent visitors are just regular citizens. People like:
When he’s not talking Orioles baseball, former Pratt volunteer and life-long “cinemaniac” Peter Geier is foraging through our Foreign Film and Documentary racks to find more material for his impressive film review blog, Moom Pitchers Not To Miss (which is old Baltimorese for “moving pitchers”).
Though this well-traveled writer has lived all over the world in the past, he currently lives within walking distance of Pratt, so he visits our department almost daily. After stocking up on our DVDs, Peter usually heads to the Annex to power up his laptop, jump on our Wi-Fi, and post his latest review
In addition to knowing a lot about film, Peter’s a polyglot who speaks four languages, including Russian, German and Turkish. In fact, when we received some Russian language-only movies, it was Peter who checked them out and told us what they were about!
He’s probably seen more of our collection than our staff, so in future we might have to use him as a Viewers’ Advisory resource!
Dan is an articulate, classically trained musician who likes movies almost as much as classical music. Dan actually treats our “Staff Picks” as if they were Gospel: put it on display, and Dan will press play. He has viewed virtually every video in the department. Yes, we said “video” – that neglected analog format seemingly destined to appear on a future episode of Antiques Roadshow.
Dan is a fan of the format because, as he says, “It seems like nobody watches videos anymore except for me, which leaves me a lot of titles to pick from.”
Not only does this mean there’s always something on the shelf for Dan to grab, but it’s also allowed him to discover many hidden gems “Lost in the Stacks” of SAS (some of which have never come out on DVD) like Greta Garbo in the original The Painted Veil (1934) or obscure documentaries about chewing gum, cane toads and cockroaches.
I've actually given Dan some videos from my massive home collection to watch and told him he could keep them. But, unlike me, he's not a pack-rat clutterer - once done, he promptly returned them, adding, "I wouldn't want to deprive someone else from getting enjoyment from them." Dan's a model citizen (and must have a very tidy apartment)!
Paula lives around the corner from the Central Library and uses much of her free time since retiring from the Social Security Administration roaming our aisle for foreign films, topical documentaries, and music of all genres (though she’s most partial to jazz from the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s and vintage ‘50s and ‘60s R & B singers like Big Joe Turner).
When asked what attracts her to our Foreign Film collection, Paula replies, “Hollywood movies are just too predictable. I like to watch foreign films to get a better perspective on how otherpeople live and what’s going on in the world.” Her favorite movies are the colorful song-and-dance spectaculars from Bollywood and gritty Brazilian films like City of God (“I own a copy now”) and Black Orpheus (“Which I never get tired of re-watching”).
The ever-curious Paula always looks forward to checking out our “new releases” display, and has seen so many movies that we sometimes joke, “We’re running out of materials for you – you’ve seen everything!”
But that’s about as likely to happen as Sights & Sounds running out of interesting patrons to assist and befriend.
"Here I am a record on a jukebox/A little piece of plastic with a hole - oh!/Play me - Play me and my plastic turns to gold"- 10cc, "Worst Band in the World"
"Record keeps on spinning/Makes my life worth living...Record keeps on turning/All the hits I'm learning/Play forever in my mind" - The Tweeds, "I Need That Record"
Since 2007, the third Saturday in April had been celebrated across the world as Record Store Day. In honor of this auspicious event, this post includes a shout-out to six documentaries I've found that address the independent record store - whose numbers are growing ever more scarce, despite a sudden resurgence of interest in vinyl by both fans and record-releasing bands alike - including this year's official Record Store Day film, LAST SHOP STANDING: THE RISE, FALL AND REBIRTH OF THE INDEPENDENT RECORD SHOP (UK, 2012).
As the Modfather Paul Weller says, "There are so few record shops left that we should all treasure those remaining."Weller is performing live, along with Irish rockers The Strypes, at East London's Rough Trade Records this day. (Many local record stores are also featuring live music today.) And Weller, like many other musicians (in a new tradition I like), is releasing a new single - on vinyl - to coincide with the tribute to record stores.
Thanks to 12XU Records, so is my boy Tommy Keene, who's re-releasing a picture sleeve edition of his double A-side "Back To Zero Now"/"Mr Roland."
I'm surprised that Amy Linthicum neglected to tell me that her favorite stadium rockers Queen used the occasion of Record Store Day to release Queen's First EP, a 7-inch vinyl compilation initially released in 1977, on CD - as well as a contest to win an autographed Brian May guitar! (I know Dave Wright probably already has it!).
And Baltimore's own Double Dagger (who are officially no more) released their swan song(s) album, 333 today. I don't know much about this group featuring our friend Donna Bowen's drummer son Denny, but am looking forward to seeing the documentary about them at this year's Maryland Film Festival, If We Shout Loud Enough.
The documentary profiles the record store owner and Maryland native who founded Joe's Record Paradise located on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring in 1974 (which later had a brief Baltimore outlet in Lauraville on Harford Road).
The AFI's capsule description reads: "A product of two of Maryland's seminal families - the Lees and the Blairs - Joe Lee was kicked out of prep school and rejected the world of politics and business that so many of his family embraced. This film documents the unique personality of a man who paved his own path, exploring both the history of Lee's storied political family and the deep musical traditions of the Baltimore-Washington area. Rare archival footage, rollicking music and poignant interviews help set the scene."
Along with Chick Veditz's Chick's Legendary Records in Mt. Washington, Vinyl Discoveries on Belair Road in Hamilton, and Skip Groff's Yesterday and Today Records in Rockville (not to mention all the others like Record Theater, the old Record & Tape Trader in Rodgers Forge - where I bought so many punk-New Wave singles and LPs! - Record & Tape Collectors, etc., etc.), Joe's Record Paradise was one of the great area record stores. Lee and director Michael Streissguth (Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison) will be in attendance. But if you can't make it to the AFI Silver tonight, check out one or all of the following docs (or re-watch Hi-Fidelity if you're in the mood for a feature film). And be sure to read the wonderful book Record Store Days (which I just checked out of the library today!).
Based on the successful book of the same name by Graham Jones, LAST SHOP STANDING is a 50-minute documentary that was released on 10 September 2012. It is a celebration of the unique spirit of comradeship and entrepreneurial ingenuity that has enabled so many shops to keep operating successfully against the backdrop of massive changes in the music industry, the biggest recession in years, the growth of online file sharing and the explosion of choice in music consumption.
Not long ago there was a record shop on every high street, but over 500 independent record stores have closed during the last few years. Record shops were always more than retail outlets, they are part of our culture; they support new bands and local talent. A place for musicians and music fans to congregate, to browse away a few hours, to walk away with music they didn’t know existed.
The film features appearances by musicians and industry insiders including Johnny Marr, Norman Cook, Billy Bragg, Paul Weller, Nerina Pallot and Richard Hawley , but the real stars are the record shop owners, their stories are the stuff of folklore! The film tells the full story, holds back no punches, but also celebrates and promotes our great independent record stores."
I love Johnny Marr's description of record stores as "a library for your ears and your mind" and his characterization of listening to .mp3s as an ultimately "vague...infinite experience" that doesn't engage like the "bookend-ed" start-flip-and-finish ritual of listening to records. Digital playlists are not engaging because they "never kind of...complete." Exactly!
Marr's comments mirror those of Norton Records impresario Miriam Linna in Brett Milano's Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting: "A record is that object that you can hold and watch and learn from. Look at the label, it's got all that information that somebody wanted to give you. There's the names of the people who wrote the songs, the names of who published it, and maybe where the record comes from - if you don't find that one, it's just another mystery to solve. And the record, that's a couple of minutes of instant gratification; it's as good as a good cup of coffee. And it's a common denominator, you want people to be clued in. You play someone a great record and they don't react to it, you know it's time to get them out of your house." That's engagement; that's living in the moment!
A documentary feature examining why over 3000 independent record stores have closed across the U.S. in the past decade.
Description: "Guerilla filmmaker Brendan Toller unleashes "an elegy for a vanishing subculture...a lively, bittersweet film that examines - with caustic humor, brutal candor, and, ultimately, great affection - why roughly 3,000 indie record stores have closed across the nation over the past decade," (Johnathan Perry, Boston Globe). A tour-de-force tale of greed, media consolidation, homogenized radio, big box stores, downloading, and technological shifts in the music industry told through candid interviews, crestfallen record store owners, startling statistics, and eye-popping animation. Fat cats or our favorite record stores? You decide."
Cast:Glenn Branca, Pat Carney, Noam Chomsky, Chris Frantz, Bob Gruen, Patterson Hood, Lenny Kaye, Ian MacKaye, Legs McNeil, Thurston Moore, Mike Watt
RECORD STORE DAY - THE DOCUMENTARY uses great archival footage of record plant production and current interviews with leaders of music explaining an audiophile's holiday and some of their favorite records and what Record Store Day means to them. Interestingly, one interviewee (Doyle Davis of Nashville's Grimeys) claims that the idea for Record Store Day originated right here in Baltimore, tracing its roots to the (2008?) Noise in the Basement Conference where "guys who own record stores sitting around, spit-balling ideas" hatched this great notion of countering the gloomy predictions of record stores going out of business.
I could kick myself that I missed this when it screened at the 2011 Rehoboth Independent Film Festival because it's hard to find (Netflix doesn't have it and there's only a trailer available online, though BBC Four did air a 60-minute version online for a while) other than purchasing it directly from the film's official web site.
This was the official film of RECORD STORE DAY 2011. Sound It Out Records in Teesside, England is run by "the dryly philosophical Tom Butchart, whose wealth of knowledge helps his customers to find the song they’ve just heard in the pub or to track down that elusive rare vinyl they need to add to their collection." Official film web site synopsis:
"Over the last five years an independent record shop has closed in the UK every three days.
SOUND IT OUT is a documentary portrait of the very last surviving vinyl record shop in Teesside, North East England.
A cultural haven in one of the most deprived areas in the UK, SOUND IT OUT documents a place that is thriving against the odds and the local community that keeps it alive. Directed by Jeanie Finlay who grew up three miles from the shop.
A distinctive, funny and intimate film about men, the North and the irreplaceable role music plays in our lives.
I just found out about this documentary from the director of Grateful Dawg (2000). It documents "the most famous record store in the world," Village Music of Mill Valley, CA, which closed on September 30, 2007. Anticipating the end, the brother and sister director-producer team of Gillian (Grateful Dawg, Keepin’ Time) and Monroe Grisman "documented the comings and goings of customers, in-store performances (DJ Shadow DJing in-store every day for 30 days), and the eventual closing of the famous Dutch door of the record store.," according to a detailed review of this film by the blog site fleamarketfunk. The filmmakers raised funds via a Kickstarter campaign and are currently screening their completed documentary at film festivals (the first screening was at the Sonoma International Film Festival, April 12, 2013.) Though the official web site link is broken, there are Facebook and Twitter links for it, as well as the following trailer (featuring fans Bonnie Raitt, Bettye Lavette, B.B. King, Huey Lewis, Bob Weir and Elvis Costello):
Official Kickstarter site synopsis: "Director George Lucas researched the soundtrack for "American Graffiti" at the store and B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Sammy Hagar, Ry Cooder, Cab Calloway, Jerry Garcia, Huey Lewis and Elvis Costello are among the many stars that have hung out and shopped there over the years. One could always discover something new in this enclave of vintage vinyl and vast memorabilia – enough to rival any respectable American cultural museum.
What made Village Music so unique was its proprietor, John Goddard, a one-of-a-kind music historian and collector who bought the shop in 1968, after working there as a teenager. For countless musicians, John has been a tremendous resource, mentor and friend as well as a nexus for the entire musical community – reviving the careers of forgotten artists and staging some of the most unforgettable concert parties at the legendary Sweetwater saloon. But like so many other independents, Village and John fell victim to the economic shifts of the town and the music industry, unable to compete in the iPod era, the rise of the CD and changes in taste among young music buyers."
In his review for TechZwy ("Village Music Captures the Age of Record Shops at Brink of Digital Age"), Joshua Phillips added that the documentary is "about more than just a music shop. Rather, it’s a story about the evolution of music formats over the last half-century, from LP’s to 8 tracks, to the Cassettes, the CD, and now digital downloads."
Village Music was more than just a retail shop with records in it, according to the director. "It was also like a museum of music across many genres and eras of pop culture...People made pilgrimages from around the world to pay one last visit to this store. It was an amazing experience to be along for the ride over the last 8 months of the stores existence and we captured it all. This film truly is a labor of love for us as it is a story that needs to be told and shared with the world,” he said. “It is a story that all will be able to relate to (even if they are growing up now in the world of downloads and file sharing).”
I look forward to seeing this film when it becomes more widely available.
***
FOR THE RECORDS directed by Hazel Sheffield and Emily Judem, USA, 2012, 33 minutes
Lastly, I just heard about this one, which laments the demise of Bleeker Bob's Records in New York City. It was produced by the online news publication Capital New York.
Synopsis from Stereogum: "Legendary Greenwich Village record store Bleecker Bob’s, a shop that has been there for pretty much every notable incarnation of the modern NYC music scene, will be leaving it’s West 3rd Street location as the landlord seeks to increase the storefront’s rent to the very expensive level of the modern day West Village. Capital New York has put together a 30-minute documentary about the store and its future called For The Records, a film that features interviews with Bob Plotnik— who opened up Bleecker Bob’s in the ’60s, right in the heart of the Greenwich Village folk scene — and other characters integral in the store’s legacy. "
From Hazel Sheffield and Emily Judem's article for Capital New York:
When Bob Plotnik quit law to open up a record store in Greenwich Village in the '60s, the only thing he wanted was to get hold of his favorite street doo-wop records ahead of everyone else.
He couldn’t have known that the store would still be there nearly 50 years later—that it would survive the introduction of cassettes, CDs and MP3s, outlast CBGB, even stay open after Bob had a huge stroke and handed the store over to his colleagues to run.
And though "Bleecker Bob" is identified with some of the great names of rock and roll through the decades, and especially downtown movements from the Village's folk scene through punk, new wave and alternative music, now, time is finally catching up with the oldest record store in the Village.
There are cracks in the black and white linoleum floor. Dust gathers on Bob’s collection of art deco clocks, many of which have stopped. Though the landlord of their building on West Third Street has been good to Bob over the years, he’s finally putting the rent up in line with prices in the area. Bleecker Bob’s is getting priced out.
Bleecker Bob’s will stay open until the landlord has found a new tenant. When it goes, it will take with it a huge part of the history of the Village. And it looks unlikely to find a new place to open up. Here, meet the people who made the store a New York institution, and watch as they struggle to decide what's next. And, next time you're in the neighborhood, stop in while you can.
Sadly, Bleecker Bob's record store has since been replaced by a frozen yogurt joint, which gives countless record junkies The Big Chill.
Oh, and finally...no post about Record Store Day would be complete without Wild Man Fischer's 1975 paen to Rhino Records, "Go To Rhino Records" - which was the novelty label's first-ever release:
So enjoy Record Store Day and remember - all sales are vinyl!
The 44-year-old Lutherville Republican is charged with driving while under the influence of alcohol, a headlight violation and negligent driving, police said. He allegedly had a blood-alcohol level that was more than twice the legal limit. An officer observed the vehicle traveling with no headlights and saw it come to a sudden stop at a red light, passing the crosswalk of the intersection.
When the officer tried to stop the councilman, Huff drove a half-block and pulled into the parking lot of the Brooks-Huff Tire & Auto Center in the 900 block of York Road, a business his family owns, according to the statement of charges.
“Don’t you know who I am?” he allegedly told the officer when asked for his driver’s license and vehicle registration card. “You stopped me on my own property.”
I highlighted the part the story detailing how this shameless dirtball pol tried to avoid getting arrested by stopping at his family's "own property" at Brooks-Huff Tire & Auto Center in Towson because...synchronicity!...barely two months later my girlfriend Amy had to go to Brooks-Huff to have them install the four new tires she had purchased on the Internet. And - surprise! - her experience here was just as dodgy and ludicrous as Councilman Huff's ridiculous claim that he was immune to prosecution because he pulled into his family business' lot. Though the staff there were exceedingly nice to her, she said she felt like she was in a sitcom, an automotive Comedy of Errors. In a nutshell, what Amy and the auto center staff experienced was akin to what Strother Martin's sadistic prison warden in Cool Hand Luke (1967) termed "a failure to communicate." I'll say!
I purchased a set of tires online from http://tirebuyer.com, and needed a shop to send them to. On tirebuyer a list of recommended shops is given, so I chose this place which had mostly positive reviews.
Well, maybe I would have been better off having the tires put on at Mr.Tire. I had an appointment at 10 to have the work done. I came in and clearly stated why I was there.I also asked for my wiper blades to be replaced. (My rear wiper blade was hanging off.} My info was verified in their computer, and I decided to wait there at the shop.
About 45 minutes later, my name was called, and one of the people at the counter told me that my car looked fine, but that it needed new tires. Well, umm, that is why I was there, and what I had clearly stated when I came in. So he looked confused, glanced at a piece of paper and apologized. Back I went to the waiting area.
After some time passed, they called my name again, and I was hopeful that my car was ready. But it was a different gentleman, who told me that my car would need new tires. Again. And again, this person looked confused and looked at the piece of paper, and apologized. Back to the waiting room I went.
Some time passed. I get called out again. Again I was hopeful. But I was told that there was a problem, that one of my wipers is special and not in stock, but that they can get it within a reasonable time. Fine, I said. Back in the waiting room once more. (Thank goodness Kindles really hold a charge.)
Finally, my name was called again, and I was told - hallelujah - that my car was really ready! I paid my bill, walked out the door, and -- my wiper blade was still hanging off! I went back in and told them the work wasn't done. Someone came out and said that the blade still hadn't come in! So back into the waiting room I went again!
At 12:30 I was finally out the door. I was given cards for two free oil changes, and the guy at the counter apologized and said things are usually "not like that." But I will not be going back to find out. I felt like I was in a sitcom!!! I don't know what the problem was, but my experience was ridiculous.
In life, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression and if I was the manager, I would have serviced Amy free-of-charge after such an exasperating customer experience. (And remember, Amy's nice; anyone else - like me - would have had a conniption!) Failing that, I wonder: is there a police charge for Working Under the Influence? (WUI)? If so, write up the ticket!
(Following is a profile of local film luminary George Figgs that I wrote - in corporate-friendly "perky voice" - for my workplace's blog. Librarians love George! - Tom Warner)
How many people can say they’ve picked out movies for Jesus Christ at their local library? Well, the folks in Pratt Central’s Sights & Sounds Department have had that honor – regularly, in fact!
OK, technically Pratt library regular George Figgs (pictured left) isn’t the historical Jesus whose birthday Christians celebrate each December 25th - he’s much too young, for one thing (even though he is an AARP member!) and he was born in Hampden rather than Bethlehem - but he played the Messiah in John Waters’ 1970 cult film Multiple Maniacs. It’s not exactly the most historically accurate portrayal, either, but look it up in the Internet Movie Database and there it is plain as day: “George Figgs, Jesus Christ.”
That’s a pretty lofty credit for any actor, but it’s only one feather in George’s signature hat (yes, George always wears a stylish hat) - and certainly better than his scarecrow role in Waters’ twisted Oz short Dorothy, the Kansas City Pothead.
Besides being a regular “Dreamlander” player in all of John Waters’s feature films except Cry-Baby (though in less-lofty roles ranging from an asylum inmate to a “Neuter”), the multi-talented actor-artist-writer-projectionist-film curator/historian is also a regular at Pratt Central, where he loads up on as many documentaries and foreign films as he can carry back to the light rail stop (not to mention anything to do with his beloved Edgar Allen Poe, about whom he’s written a screenplay).
Watch George Figgs as hairdresser Dribbles in John Waters'"Female Trouble"
George Figgs as hairdresser Dribbles in John Waters'"Female Trouble"
His movie mania is a holdover from his days running his arthouse “temple of celluloid,” the Opheum Theater, in Fells Point from 1990-1999 and “Orpheum George” (as he’s known around town) is still an avid cineaste and an iconic fixture in the local arts scene; just last year the 66-year-old film buff curated the acclaimed three-day, 10-filmRetroCineFestat the University of Baltimore and is currently planning a film revival series in partnership with Station North’s Autograph Playhouse. (And he also appears in Jeffrey Schwartz’s new documentary, I Am Divine, talking about his dearly departed friend Glen Milstead, better known as John Waters superstar “Divine.”)
But more importantly, George Figgs represents the kind of patron for whom Pratt Library’s free services are ideally suited during these tough economic times. As a retiree on a fixed income, George can neither afford to join NetFlix nor to see movies at the Cineplex. That’s why he loves the fact that he can grab armfuls of free DVDs at Central, which he calls “the best deal in town for the financially challenged!”
“I have to live on Social Security and food stamps” George says. “I can’t afford to go see new releases or even revival films at The Charles unless I get a pass.” Luckily, George is a fan of the kind of films Sights & Sounds prides itself on – classic film noir crime dramas, award-winning documentaries, and a wide range of foreign films from around the world. He still has his VCR, so he can further utilize our large, and often overlooked, eclectic collection of VHS tapes. And when he's unable to make it downtown, George likes to stream movies on his laptop at home, using our handy Web guide to the best sites to "Watch Movies, TV Shows and More Online for Free." (He's a particular fan of the free movie site Open Culture.)
Besides checking out our films, George has taken full advantage of our reference services, as well. Since we subscribe to the entertainment industry pay service IMDbPro, which lists contact information for over 10,000 companies and 65,000, George was able to get legal clearance for all his RetroCineFest film screenings via the studio phone numbers and emails we found there. And he was elated when, eager to have famous independent movie director-producer Roger Corman read his Edgar Allen Poe screenplay, we not only got him an address to mail his script to, but a direct phone number that enabled him to talk to Mr. Corman in person!
We're elated to service a Baltimore film legend - and so glad he takes advantage of all the free services available at the library!
I'm really looking forward to this year's Memorial Weekend highlight, the 30th annual SoWeBohemian Arts & Music Festival (aka the SoWeBo Arts & Music Festival or, simply, The SoWeBo Fest) on Sunday May 26. Mainly because not only will the "Marble Bar Redux" stage at the corner of Arlington and Lombard once again feature musical blasts from the past that I actually remember (The Beatoes, The Motor Morons, Thee Katatonix), but this year will also feature The Mark Harp All-Stars paying homage (which sounds way too serious!) to - and having fun with (that sounds much better!) - the music of The Big Man himself, our dearly departed friend and musical-genius-mentor Mark Linthicum (aka "Mark Harp,""Harpo,""Corky Neidermayer" and "The King of Peru"), who left this mortal coil well before his time on Christmas Eve of 2004. Geesh, former Null Set/Cabal and Black Pete frontman - and longtime Harp collaborator - Bill Dawson (aka "Bil Dawson" back in the day) is coming all the way up from Jacksonville, Florida for this shindig, so that tells you something about what a big deal the Big Man was, and continues to be to those discerning music lovers in B-more who "get it."
Listen to Null Set (Bill Dawson, Mark Harp, John Chreist, Lou Frisino) play their theme song.
Beatoes fans should get there early, as the Too-Ugly-for-MTV boys will take the stage at High Noon.
Thee Katatonix will bring their Beltway Beat to Shake Shake the masses at 5 p.m., followed by Mongolian Glow at 6 p.m., The Motor Morons at 6:30 p.m., and The Mark Harp All-Stars (with a Cecil B. DeMille-worthy "cast of thousands") at 7 p.m. This incarnation of the All-Stars playing the Mark Harp back catalog will include Ben Watson (lead guitar), David Zidek (bass), Chris "Batworth" Ciattei (drums), BeefaloBob Friedman (keyboards), Robyn Webb (rhythm guitar), Ceil Strakna (vocals), Cindy Borchardt (vocals), Valerie Favazza (vocals) and special guest appearances by Chris Dennestaedt (The Beatoes, Casio Cats, Poverty & Spit), David Wilcox (Chelsea Graveyard, Pooba, The Alcoholics) and, of course, the aforementioned Bil(l) Dawson.
Big thanks to Robyn Webb for orchestrating the Mark Harp All-Stars project; Robyn also MC'ed the Marble Bar Redux stage line-up last year. Returning to manage the line-up this year is none other than iconic Motor Moron and Pleasant Liver singer Fred Collins, who co-managed Marble Bar Redux 2012 with fellow Motor Moron Sam Fitzsimmons. (As they say in horse breeding parlance, those are studs with really good bloodlines for this racing card.) Like just about everybody associated with the Marble Bar line-up, Robyn and Fred once played with Mark Harp.
Watch a clip of Fred manically performing "Big Headed Baby" with the Pleasant Livers at the 2012 SoWeBo Festival, below:
I would be remiss if I did not post Scott Kecken's short film "SoWeBohemian," a video time capsule of the sights and sounds of SoWeBo festivals past - including cameos of a young, svelte Scott Huffines...
Svelte Scott says, "SoWeBo is an excuse to drink!"
...and the non-facial parts of Tom Warner's body that won't break a camera lens (look for a below-the-neck shot of him holding a Zim Zowie flyer in his Robin the Boy Wonder t-shirt!).
And finally, as we count down the days to the "Marble Bar Redux Redux," enjoy this field report from last year's festivities, "Marble Bar Redux," posted by yours truly. Hope to see you all out there Sunday! - Tom Warner
"I had a great time at the Sowebo festival yesterday! The Redux stage proved that it doesn't matter how old you are, you can still rock out! I got there just in time for the Pleasant Livers, and then watched Thee Katatonix, Motor Morons and Ben Watson's World Media War and everyone was fantastic. So good to see so many of you there!" - Amy Linthicum, Girl Reporter (via Facebook post)
As usual, Amy Linthicum says best what I can only flail at with my forked tongue. But my tongue must flail, so here goes...Yes, SoWeBohemian Festival 2012 was a blast - and a true blast from the past for those 80's Punk/New Wave relics like us who still fondly remember the Marble Bar (which closed its doors in 1985), the Galaxy Ballroom and its associated renegade musical spirit. The Marble/Galaxy contingent were treated to their own "old timey sounds" area, the "Marble Bar Retrospective" on the Redux Stage - where co-stage managers Sam Fitzsimmons (Motor Morons) and Fred Collins (Motor Morons, Pleasant Livers) oversaw the day's entertainment. They were ably assisted by emcee Robyn Webb, who introduced the day's numerous acts and kept the rock rolling smoothly.
Today marks the 145th anniversary of Memorial Day, a day to honor those men and women, both nationally and right here in our own background, who gave their lives in the service of their country.
As a port city and former steel manufacturing hub, Baltimore has always been active during military conflicts, especially during The Big One. Baltimore was right in the thick of the Allied war effort in World War II - launching the first Liberty ship (the SS Patrick Henry, which was constructed at the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard), producing military aircraft like the B-26 Marauder at the Glenn L. Martin plant in Middle River, and training grunts and sailors alike for combat duty at facilities like Camp Holabird, Fort McHenry, Curtis Bay and elsewhere.
Baltimore was certainly "on the map" during the second world war, and Hollywood took notice, name-checking B-more for its stereotypical "Charm City" attributes in a number of films. Long before this town become synonymous with violent crime, drug peddling and urban decay in TV series like Homicide, The Wire and The Corner (not to mention prostitution - don't forget, Tippy Hedren's mom in Hitchcock's Marnie was a sailor-baiting floozy), a Baltimore reference usually involved beer (our German brewing heritage long celebrated by H.L. Mencken) and crabs (both the edible kind and, later, the sexually-transmitted variety) - though in Fred Zinnemann's post-war film The Search (1948), Montgomery Clift boasted that he was from "Baltimore, the cleanest, finest city in the United States!"
But more often than not, vets from Mobtown were vetted as legit homies by referring to our beer and seafood. One of my favorites name-checks was by native son "Pvt. Jim Layton" (played by Marshall Thompson) in William Wellman's WWII classic Battleground(1949), in which the soldier holes up under wreckage dreaming about being "back home in Baltimore, loadin' up on hard-shelled crabs and beer."
His pal Holley (Van Johnson) counters, "That dream's against regulations, soldier. You know what our boys overseas always dreams about."
Pvt. Jim Layton: "Mom's blueberry pie?"
Holley: "Why certainly. That's what they're fighting for. Boy, when I get home, just give me a hot dog and a slice of that pie. Am I gonna kick when I don't get my job back? No siree."
I've excerpted that "Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time" clip below as a fitting Memorial Day tribute to our vets and their service fighting for the Baltimore - if not the American - culinary "way of life."Pie schmie! Crabs and beers on the homefront - it's what got this town's Band of Brothers through WWII!
It was the best of times, it was the Worz of times (yes, perpetually frenetic scenester Keith Worz was there!) at the 30th annual SoWeBohemian Arts & Music Festival held this past Memorial Weekend Sunday in Baltimore's failed experiment in neighborhood gentrification, SoWeBo (which I guess stands for SouthWest Baltimore, but was originally coined by the early bohemian settlers to show their solidarity with South Africa's Soweto townships).
Musicians chill in The Redux Stage's open-air VIP Lounge
Though there's a lot to see and do down at SoWeBo - like all the art and crafts on display (though most people seem to just eat, drink, get sunburn, and listen to the free music) - Amy "I have enough t-shirts & jewelry" Linthicum and I set out to hang at the Marble Bar Time Capsule Stage (officially known as The Redux Stage, on the corner of Arlington and Lombard) as our prime objective, because this was Festival Ground Zero for seeing all the old people (Marble Bar Baby Boomers like us) and hearing all the old music (late '70s & 1980s Punk-New Wave-Postpunk) that we like.
The stage was managed by Fred Collins (Motor Morons, Pleasant Livers), with DJ "Lightning"Rod Misey (former WCVT-Towson State University and current WVUD-University of Delaware jock who interviewed and played countless Punk-New Wave bands - like Da Moronics, Ivan & The Executioners, Thee Katatonix, etc. - during his late '70s/early '80s radio reign) emceeing the proceedings and Joe Berky of Sound Productions handling, um, sound and production.
The Mark Harp All-Stars idea was the brainchild of long-time Harp collaborator Robyn Webb (following a suggestion by Fred Collins), who posted on her Facebook page the following thank-you to all who participated in the day's festivities:
Still in recovery, but want to offer major thanks to everyone, Chris Dennstaedt, Chris Ciattei, Cecilia Strakna, Robert J. Friedman, David Zidek, David Wilcox, Bill Dawson, Cindy Borchardt, Craig Considine and Ben Watson for making Mark Harp's All-Stars a reality one more time....Despite scheduling snafus, equipment failures and general chaos, they said it couldn't be done, but we pulled it off...Thanks also to Fred Collins, the SoWeBo Festival committee, Joe Berky, Thee Katatonix, Motor Morons, Mongoloidian Glow, Trufax & The Insaniacs, David Wright, Tom Warner and to all of you that stuck around until the bitter end to share Mark Harp's music with us. Great to see so many old friends together in one place. - Robyn Webb
Well said, Robyn. My only regret was that the star-studded set started so late, at Twilight's last gleaming after a long day's journey into (SoWeBo) blight. But as Larry Vega would say, "What the hell ya gonna do?"
Apparently, there was a little "drama" behind the scenes of the All-Stars event, but I try to avoid conflicts and confrontations as much as I can (I get enough of that on a daily basis at my job!); interested parties can read Robyn's soap opera recap at Mark Harp's All-Stars.) (I did, however, love Robyn's snarky riposte to all the post-event carping: "Lessons learned: Get a lead guitar player who owns a guitar. Never follow the Motor Morons or an animal act.")
Robert J. Friedman (aka "Beefalo Bob") put it all into perspective with his tempered observation that "...organizing the un-organizable Mark Harp All-Stars...(was) a task that made herding cats look easy. Sure it could have been better, and it should have been earlier, however I thought we served the Big Man's memory well and made him the star of yet another SoWeBo Festival!"
More on The Big Event celebrating the music of The Big Man, Mark Harp (Mark Linthicum, 1957-2004), later in this long-winded tome...but first, a litany of the day's events in chronological order as they happened...with accompanying videos recorded by yours truly...
The SoWeBeatoes Thanks to a family medical emergency, Amy and I missed most of The Beatoes' noon set (why so early?; we barely had time to put on our sunblock!), catching only their last number, "Mouse in a Blender," an old Poverty & Spit vermin supremo delicacy that featured guest vocals by erstwhile Spit and current Thee Katatonix honcho Adolf Kowalski.
Adolf released a bunch of balloons, just like Nena in "99 Luftballons," though I don't think his act was as symbolically charged as the Krautpop fraulein's.
This was the first stage appearance by Chris Dennstaedt, the man Robyn Webb always intros as "Philadelphia's answer to Beck Hansen," who would return to the Redux Stage later that night to perform with the All-Stars. By all accounts, Chris did some major heavy lifting on the day (no wonder he wears a wrist brace!), being called into duty to carry much of the All-Stars guitar duties. As Robyn Webb later commented, "After all this hoopla, we still had to go to the bullpen immediately upon the first pitch...[and] Chris, as a relief pitcher was far from warmed up, but managed to deliver when he hit the mound." Copy that and color me impressed!
Afterwards, Amy and I wandered around the festival, running into mutual acquaintance friends and peeps like Billy McConnell and his girlfriend Nicole...
...and Bill Barnett, who used to work with Mark Harp when they were DJs at WJHU back in the '80s and had a music blog, Burl Veneer's Music Blog, which had a great tribute to "The King of Peru."
"I read today that Alberto Fujimori, former President of Peru, was just convicted of abuse of power, the first in what should be a string of convictions. But that just reminded me of my dear friend Mark Harp, who in his final years was the self-styled King of Peru. In fact, nearly every day something reminds me of Mark; just a few days ago he figured in my post on Vigil. I met Mark when I was 17, a freshman in college. The campus radio station, WJHU, had a marvelously liberal policy regarding on-air staff: you didn't have to be a student, or even affiliated with the university at all! Mark was a so-called "community member" of the radio station. I got to know him when I graduated from the 3-6 AM timeslot into 1-3 AM; he came on after me. He scared me a bit at first, because he was a big, ugly guy. But he was incredibly friendly and his enthusiasm for music was unbounded. Every week he brought a mind-blowing case of records into the studio with him, and I would often stick around for an hour or two just to hear them, and what he did with them. Mark's ecumenical taste in music opened my eyes to so much that I had ignored until then, so he is probably more responsible than anyone else for broadening my own musical world."
On a day that was paying homage to the Mark's memory, I thought this was a touching tribute. I too was a "community member" at JHU's then 5-watt radio station in the early '80s (was anyone there from Hopkins? I recall a lot of TSU-ers having shows), along with my ex Katie Glancy, City Paper writer Michael Yockel, and countless others. I think my solo show was "Make Believe Ballroom" and my show with Katie was "We Am a DJ" (named after the David Bowie song) and can recall interviewing Boy Meets Girl on air there; BMG singer-songwriter Ceil Strakna would perform later that day with the Mark Harp All-Stars.
Oh, and two fans even recognized me from my old public access television atrocity exhibition, Atomic TV (one guy confessed he couldn't get enough of the Underdog Lady episodes while Harvey Wiley other gave me card for his YouTube animated series "Punk Rock Negro" available on the spaceboycmx channel).
We then headed back down to the Redux Stage shortly before Thee Katatonix's 5 p.m. scheduled set, where some unscheduled spoken word and dance performances were taking place.
Mary Knott's Poetry Gong Show Boy, timing is everything. Poor Mary Knott was slotted to give her poetry reading before a unreceptive, sometimes heckling, urban audience that had gathered to see the act that followed hers, the Dynamic Movement Dance Team. Alas, her words fell on def ears.
Wow, tough crowd! One guy stood directly in front of Mary and glared at her, shaking his head dismissively and giving her the "cut it short" motion with his hand. Guess he was impatient to see the skinny-tights gals in the Dynamic Movement troupe - I suspect he's from the "It ain't the Mete(r), it's the Motion" school of thought - but rude is rude. Respect, brother, respect - spelled R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Robyn Webb diffused the situation by thanking Mary and cracking "Where's that gong when you need it?" as he ushered her off the stage. Mary avoided getting the gong and the Dynamic Movement came on to do their thing.
Dynamic Movement Dance Team I have to say, these kids were really good and busted some truly dynamic moves. Not my music and not my style, but talent is talent, and these terpsichoreans "brought it"!
I'm sure the crowd enjoyed the one girl's exposed butt crack as she gyrated, to boot(y). (Joy is where you find it, after all! Look for butt crack at the 1:48 mark!)
Dancing with the Stars, SoWeBo Style So much for the professionals...It was also a day of wild abandon as far as dancing and gyrating music lovers were concerned in the amateur ranks, from a Headbanging Woman in a Wheelchair clutching a Pet Pigeon to her breast (she seemed to have an epiphany during Thee Katatonix's set - see her rock out when they played "Second Chance")...
Wheelchair lady holds pigeon - and Thee Katatonix - near and dear to her heart
...to a high-jumping, high-kicking black dude who went airborne during the Motor Morons set (Dave Wright and I suspected he might have been amped-up on Bath Salts and cautiously covered our faces whenever near him - just in case he wanted to chew off our well-chiseled faces)...
...to uber-fans Blade of the Motor Morons pulling people from the crowd to dance with her and wildman Keith Worz of Marble Bar Lore - beer always in hand - pounding his fist on the stage and imploring the musicians to rock on.
(I remember well the time Keith came to a 1979 Katatonix gig in Annapolis where his frenetic pogo dancing so impressed a local music critic that he got singled out in the review for resembling something along the lines of "Jerry Lewis exposed to repeated electro-shocks"!)
I hadn't seen Keith in years, if not decades. Googling him later, I found out that there's a short film by Zach Greenbaum called "Out To Lunch" on YouTube that stars Keith and is based on real events from his life. Filmed in Keith's basement, it's about two friends that reconnect after many years.
Thee Katatonix Thee Katatonix came on next and played a set that alternated between Mr. Urbanity (Charlie Gatewood)'s hook-happy psych-pop tunes ("Daisy Chain,""Second Chance," Ordinary Sunday") and Adolf's early, punky pre-Divine Mission LP tunes ("Highlandtown,""Basket Case,""My Son the Gynecologist,""Valentine's Day") that were highlights of my (Tommy Gunn's) Katatonix Mk 1.0 reign-of-error days (1979-1980).
Adolf set the day's in-your-rocking-face tone with his choice of the opening salvo, the subtly named "Fuck You" (officially known as "F*** You" on their Thanks Hon, 30th Anniversary CD, and which sounds suspiciously like a re-working of the old Kats tune "Stretch Marx" with new lyrics).
Then it was on to such primal sonic blasts as "Basket Case" and "Valentine's Day," which date from the Kats first-ever vinyl recording, their 1983 EP ("Thanx to no one") on UK Spud Records.
I noticed that ever since the Kats played their all-Ramones covers set February 9th at The Metro Gallery, Charlie Gatewood has turned into Johnny Ramone on guitar, playing with a renewed vigor and reveling in power chord downstrokes ("They'll kill your wrists, take it from me!" Beatoes guitarist Chris Dennstaedt later remarked to Charlie, holding up his wrist brace). The transformation seems to be intentional.
Charlie Gatewood (L) channels the spirit of Johnny Ramone
(For the record: Mark Harp was also a big Ramones fan; in fact, he was cremated in a Ramones t-shirt.)
"Tommy, you missed it - we were The Ramones at the Metro," Charlie remarked afterwards. "Instead of just playing the old Katatonix tunes, I thought, why don't we play those great early Ramones songs like "Commando" and "Carbona Not Glue" and we nailed it, man. It was fun and who better to be Joey Ramone than Adolf? We had it down!"
Thee Katatonix transformed into The Ramones at Metro Gallery on Feb. 9, 2013
And did the audience like it?
"Who cares?" Charlie replied. "We had a blast playing it and that's what's it all about. It was fun!"
Charlie then proceed to recite the words to Dee Dee Ramone's "Commando": "First Rule is: the laws of Germany, Second Rule is: be nice to Mommy, Third Rule is: don't talk to Commies, Fourth Rule is: eat kosher salamis!"
Who says The Ramones weren't thought-provoking?
And for that matter, who said those early Katatonix tunes weren't thought-provoking? "Basket Case" anticipates amputee romance, a subject critics raved about in the recent Marie Cotillard arthouse film Rust and Bone; "Highlandtown" (dedicated this day to neighborhood native Don White of Da Moronics) addressed male hustling in East Baltimore ("Highlandtown is my kind of town, where everyone pulls their pants down/To make some bread you use your head") in the same way that Dee Dee Ramone immortalized street meat in "53rd and 3rd"; and "My Son the Gynecologist" eerily anticpates the sexual needs of horndog doctors, a la the recent sex scandal (and subsequent) suicide of Johns Hopkins physician Nikita A. Levy. Who knew?
Here's another view of "Second Chance" (for you completists!) recorded by Danny Simpson that has lotsa good close-ups of Big Andy Small and Honest Ed Linton for all you Rhythm Section groupies :
(I promise to post more Katatonix videos from their set in future. Stay tuned...)
Tru Fax & The Insaniacs Washington, D.C.'s classic pop quartet Tru Fax & The Insaniacs came on after Thee Katatonix as their surprise "Mystery Dates." They were intro'ed and outro'ed by Adolf Kowalski, who has been re-smitten with Diana Quinn's melodic foursome ever since they played together at the Metro Gallery back in February, and decided to donate the rest of the Kats' allotted set to his Capital District friends.
I have to say that few records hold up as well as Tru Fax's "Washingtron" b/w "Mystery Date" single (Wasp Records, 1980).
"Washington/Mystery Date" single (Wasp Records 1980)
In 1980, Washington Magazine dubbed them the District's "Worst Band," but what would you expect from those squares? (Atomic TV was once voted Charm City's "Best Worst TV," so I consider them comrades-in-arms for that alone!) No sir, that's a badge of honor. They were, and are, a great band (though I dearly miss original bass player Libby Hatch, who passed away in a motorcycle accident years ago).
Tru Fax performed three songs in a riveting mini-set that played like a killer EP record: "Love Love Love,""Mars Needs Women," and "King of Machines"(which sounded so Ig-quisite to my ears that I thought it was a Stooges cover!).
By this time, acts were running over Redux time limits, so apparently the Tru Fax set was cut short, much to Adolf's dismay. Still, the Insaniacs' EP-length performance was better than nothing.
...and will perform in the area in the immediate future with her swinging '60s "Girl Group Sound" band The Fabulettes next Saturday, June 8 (Main Stage, 6:30 p.m.) at the HonFest in Hampden. And yes, the Fabulettes (Diana, Lisa Mathews and Jane Quinn Brack) sport the requisite double-decker B-52 beehives that fit in perfectly for the Honfest.
Milling about afterwards, a enthused Charlie Gatewood was singing the praises of Tru Fax's rendition of "Mars Needs Women." He reminded me that he went to see Tru Fax playing with Thee Katatonix Mk. 1.0 in DC - on his wedding night! -some 30-plus years ago. Now that's a fan! That's a graduate of Rock & Roll High School!
Motor Morons The Motor Morons came on well past their original 6:30 p.m. start time (the spoken word and dance performances probably backed up the schedule) and played a long and enthusiastic set. It seems that sparks fly and brains fry whenever the Morons play. The crowd was really into it, especially the aforementioned Bath Salts Man and Pink Lady, who took over front stage to put on a Dancing with the Stars performance that momentarily looked like it might turn into a romantic hookup.
As the sun set, The Mark Harp All-Stars finally took the stage to pay their respects to the departed legend Mark Harp (Mark Linthicum, 1957-2004), whose musical legacy included countless bands, including (working backwards) Chelsea Graveyard, The Tralalas, The Diamondheads, Pornflakes, Step 3, Interrobang, Asshead, Cabal, Null Set, Not Null Set, The Mark Harp Club, The Mark Harp Experience, The Beatoes, The Casio Cats, The Casio Cowboys, P.A.B.L.U.M., Timmy, Globetrotters, The Muggers, Mold and Mildew, Maternity Ward - to name a (whew!) few!
And I'm pretty sure Keith Worz saw all those bandsl!
Keith Worz implores the All-Stars to pull his finger
The All-Stars ranks on this day were filled with the following: Robyn Webb (guitar, vocals), Chris Dennstaedt (guitar, vocals), Ben Watson (guitar), Robert J. Friedman (aka "Beefalo Bob," keyboards), Dave Zidek (bass), Chris "Batworth" Ciattei (drums), Ceil Strakna (lead and backing vocals), Cindy Borchardt (vocals), with special guest appearances by singers Bill Dawson, Steptoe T. Magnificent (Dave Wilcox), and trombone player Craig Considine (Rumba Club, Boister, All Mighty Senators).
I think the All-Stars they were originally scheduled to play for an hour, but I'd be surprised if their shortened 10-song set - which opened with "Null Theme" and ended with a cover of Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes" - was much over 40 minutes. The complete setlist (with lead singer and original associated group in parentheses) is listed below.
The Mark Harp All-Stars Setlist: Null Theme (Bill Dawson, Null Set) Fall Flat (Bill Dawson, Null Set) I'm Too Ugly for MTV (Chris Dennstaedt, Beatoes) Mad Dog 20/20 (Chris Dennstaedt, Beatoes) Bowling With You (Robyn Webb, Ceil Strakna) Rock 'n' Roll Asshole (Steptoe T. Maginficent) Dating the Wrestlers (Ceil Strakna) Big Man (Ceil Strakna, w/ Craig Considine on trombone) I've Got Five Dollars (Everyone) All the Young Dudes (Robyn Webb, Steptoe T. Magnificent)
Long Day's Journey into Blight Former Null Set/Cabal and Black Pete singer Bill Dawson, with wife Michelle, traveled all the way from Jacksonville, Florida to Charm City's crumbling westside to sing two nuggets from his early '80s days collaborating with Mark Harp in Null Set and Cabal and to meet up once again with old friends.
Dundalkians Bill & Amy bond over their shared East Baltimore heritage
Bill was stylishly attired in all-leather (we would settle for nothing less!) and colorful ink (he's a professional tattoo artist) on this sunny day, and indicated afterwards that he and the missus were hoping to move back to Baltimore eventually.
Fittingly, the day's tribute began with the two-song Null Set set, which included the anthemic "Null Theme" (featuring the legendary "Null Chord") and "Fall Flat."
At one point during "Fall Flat," Bill Dawson pointed to an empty space and remarked, "This is where Mark plays a serious guitar solo. But he can't do that, because he's dead." Alas, true dat.
Dawson was awesome and his brief stint after coming from so far away down the coast meant everything to the Marble Bar oldtimers - and no doubt to Mark.
Next up, the spirit of Corky Neidermayer was invoked for the classic "Bowling With You," with Robyn Webb handling lead vocals while backup singers Ceil Strakna and Cindy Borchardt hit the girly ooo-aaahs.
Steptoe once remarked that, during a low point in his nearly 40-year-career in rock 'n' roll, it was Mark Harp who inspired him to keep on keeping on, and he's never looked back since.
Next, former Boy Meets Girl and Big As a House singer-songwriter Ceil Strakna stepped out front from her backing vocal duties to belt out two classic Mark Harp tunes, "Dating the Wrestlers" and the anthemic Harp homage, "Big Man." (In 1991, Mark Harp rewrote "Big Man" as "Moguls in Training," a would-be theme song for a failed TV pilot, with Leslie Miller handling the vocals backed by Mark, Mike DeJong on sax, Dave Zidek on bass, and Jack Odell on drums; you can hear the 2004 Mark Harp Band version online at Internet Archives and 24 Hours with Mark Harp.) "Big Man" also featured the inimitable trombone stylings of Craig Considine (Mo Fine's All-Blind Orchestra, Off the Wall, Rumba Club, Boister, All Mighty Senators).
The All-Stars closed out their set with two everybody-play-along jams, Mark Harp's "I've Got Five Dollars" and a cover of Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes." Robyn Webb introed the former by noting that Mark often wrote songs inspired by a random turn of phrase, rising to the challenge of creating something out of nothing.
More videos to follow! (I'm publishing this now because YouTube just upgraded to a Google interface and I'm afraid of losing everything with all the damned multiple account logins - aaaccckkk!.)
***
It's too bad the sun set so quickly on the All-Stars' set because I'm sure we would've like to have heard more, maybe even Harpo's "Movie Dream."
If it's any consolation, I've included the Tralala's version from the 2004 Honfest in Hampden - one of Mark's last appearances before his untimely death on Christmas Eve 2004.
It would have been a fitting end to a day that had us all dreaming back to the halcyon days of youth and musical nirvana. And, like a movie reaching its end, the lights had begun to dim, ready to fade to black...
It was a great day to hear fun music and meet up with old (literally!) friends, most of whom were card-carrying (at least in spirit) members of the Mark Harp Fan Club.
Pratt Library's typo edition of "Last Year at Marienbad" directed by "Alain Reanais" (sic) instead of Alain Resnais
"Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting in scope...this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled chateau they now find themslves wandering." - From DVD box
I had never seen Alain Resnais'Last Year at Marienbad (L'annee derniere a Marienbad, 1961) until recently - and then only by accident. Despite being a fan of the director (especially his Night & Fog, Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Stavisky) and the film itself being hailed as a defining work of the French New Wave and "one of the lasting mysteries of modern art," it had flown under my radar until it came into my consciousness through the backdoor, via American pop culture.
You see, while sorting through my cornucopia of videos and DVDs in anticipation of moving to a new house, I popped in a Classic TV Commercials DVD (one of countless similarly-styled retro video products aimed at nostalgic Baby Boomers like myself) and came across a bizarre "arthouse" foreign film-style commercial for L&M Cigarettes. I subsequently uploaded it to YouTube, as shown below.
Classic '60s L&M Ad Spoofs "Last year at Marienbad"
At first I thought it was a spoof of Michaelangelo Antonioni's beautifully photographed but meandering and dialogue-sparse La-La arthouse films (L'avventura, L'eclipse, La Notte), but then it slowly dawned on me that I had seen the film's iconic baroque landscape and nattily attired tux-and-evening dress actors in images for Marienbad. I knew then that it was Arthouse Hardcore, because Resnais worked with intellectual writers like Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima, Mon Amour) and, and Marienbad, Mr. Nouveau Novel himself, Alain Robbe-Grillet.
And make no mistake, this is Arthouse Hardcore. I usually hate this type of non-narrative, enigmatic World Cinema, but, for some reason, I find Last Year at Marienbad fascinating. (Maybe because there was no Orioles game on the night I watched it?) There's nothing else quite like it. It's a film about film, a film that is always self-reflective about itself, with purposely stilted, aloof performances by its cast and literary (as opposed to natural) dialogue. (Fans of the films of Jean Cocteau will find themselves right at home here!) And no one knows what it's about (Nuclear war? A ghost story? Rape? Ennui? Memory?); in that way, it reminds me somewhat of Patrick McGoohan's cult TV series The Prisoner. Meaning is a bonus - the style's the thing, and this one is awash in style.
For some reason this 2-disc edition has gone out of print, which is a shame because I love all the extras, from French film scholar Ginette Vincendeau's history and analysis of the film and a new "Making-of-Marienbad" documentary featuring many of Resnais' crew (in which we learn that Delphine Seyrig's iconic hairdo was actually an accident - made to cover up a bad haircut after Resnais had originally envisioned her with a "Louise Brooks bob") to the inclusion of two early Resnais documentary shorts - Toute la Memoire du Monde (a 1956 documentary about the organization of the Biblioque Nationale de France that looks at libraries as an archive of human memory and which used many of the technical elements - swooping dolly shots and pans - that would later be employed in Marienbad) and 1958's Le Chant du Styrene ("The Song of the Styrene," a poetic industrial film about plastic made for French manufacturer Pechiney).
It's far from an easy film, but one that is required viewing for any student of film history. But if that sounds too daunting, there's always the encapsulated version to be found in that L&M commercial about "a cigarette for the two of you."
In the midst of life we are in death, and in in the midst of moving I am in near-death as I keep finding all sorts of scribblings, clippings, journals, zines, magazines and post-it notes that have - or at one time had - meaning to me. As a Material Boy in a Material World, I find it hard to part (such sweet sorrow it is!) with these things. My solution is to upload as much of my life as possible, so that some poor Web Editor of The Future is left to edit (or shit-can) my dubious presence on Earth after I shuffle off this mortal coil.
OK, here's one such item, a 2008 Journal I started and abandoned (mainly because I lost it until just now!). Under the first-page entry "MFF 2008 NOTES":
MARYLAND 2008 NOTES
ALEX GIBNEY, dir. of GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON documentary was cool and clever.
He intro'ed film with Thompson quote, "You bought the ticket, so enjoy the ride!"
Q&A: Woman asked why Hunter S. Thompson always wore shorts. "Do you know why he always wore shorts?" [Wow, the thought-provoking things viewers take away from documentaries; the mind boggles.] Laughter. Long pause from Gibney, after repeating the question, then a simple: "No."
McGovern anti-war quote during film about stopping wars that send ouryoung men to death got an auditorium-wide applause! Anti-Bush sentiments run high. Jimmy Buffett wished Hunter was still around to write against Bush - "We could use him now" - but, in effect, Bush killed him. Hunter was described as "depressed" after the 2004 election re-elected Bush. Killed himself in 2005.
Dumbest question of night: as usual from (loveable but no-flair-for-the-obvious) Charles Johnson. "Where did Dr. Thompson get his doctorate?" Gibney said he believed it was a joke and mentioned that he himself is a "Dr." from Universal Life Church.
Someone else asked why would anyone interview Pat Buchanan, the man who worked for Hunter's nemesis Nixon and who helped destroy Hunter's boy George McGovern. Gibney said Buchanan was a great interview - anyone not an idiot can see that. I mentioned afterward to him how much I enjoy Buchanan's wit (if not his politics), that he's cool enough to talk to Ali G [Sascha Baron Cohen's over-the-top hip-hop character] and always shines. Gibney said that Hunter would hang w/Pat and drink beer and Wild Turkey w/him, to Mrs. Buchanan's horror! I'd dink a beer and shot with Pat!
I sat next to the most annoying woman. Middle-aged, I first noticed she wouldn't turn her cell phone off. Hid it under a shawl the first 15 minutes of movie. Then she systematically chewed her fingernails - all 10 of 'em! - throughout the movie (thank God it was only 2 hours, any more and she'd prolly move onto her toenails!). Then she would transfer her remnants to her left hand and delicately rub the detritus off like she was rubbing away the salt from pistachios or chips ontop the floor near my camera bag. TOTALLY DISGUSTING. She saw me staring at her - I was hoping to shame her, but she was well beyond shame, and I had to cup my head w/my right hand, like blinders, so I could escape her wretched, and most unfortunate, presence in the last good seat in the house in the front row."
On June 19, 1987, Baltimore's City Paper celebrated its 10th anniversary of publishing with a giant special issue called "10 Years in Baltimore." One of the outstanding features, previously never archived on the Internet, was Michael Yockel's history of Baltimore's music club scene. It's a great reminder of "What Is and What Should Never Be." Along with John Strausbaugh, Yoke was one of CP's greatest writers ever. Fans can still enjoy his prose at the online site, Baltimore Fishbowl (www.baltimorefishbowl.com).
Following is the full scanned-in article; click on each page to enlarge it, then use the magnifying tool as needed to magnify the text to your taste.
I recently found this unusual film while boxing up my treasures in anticipation of an imminent move. I only have a crappy low-res black-and-white bootleg of this documentary (filmed at a theater screening - you can hear the 16mm film projector running!) about the indescribable televangelist Dr. Gene Scott (August 14, 1929-February 21, 2005), but am elated that a few discerning fans have uploaded it to the Internet, like the folks at the wonderful site Documentary Heaven (documentaryheaven.com), where the 45-minute unreleased documentary can be watched in its entirety in six nine-minute segments.
Click here to watch God's Angry Man on Documentary Heaven's site.
God's Angry Man is also available online at YouTube, where someone named novoiluminismo has posted the German-language film version in its entirely (with Herzog himself providing his inimicable, soothingly Teutonic narration), as shown below:
God's Angry Man (43:45)
The film consists mainly of interviews with Scott and his parents and selected clips from his television show Festival of Faith; the highlight is undoubtedly the wind-up toy marching band Scott rechristened "The F.C.C. Monkey Band."
This is a portrait of Dr Gene Scott a televangelist who ran into problems with the FCC in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s. Scott was eventually shut down, briefly, by the FCC. The documentary, which consists of little more than interviews with Scott and clips from his show [Festival of Faith], doesn’t really deal with the reasons why the FCC was after him, rather it tries simply to show a man on a mission trying to save people while battling his inner demons.
This is an amazing one of a kind documentary that probably could only have been made by Werner Herzog. Herzog isn’t interested in showing anything other than the man. There is no judgment as to what Scott is all about, there is just Scott talking to Herzog and to his audience. The result is a portrait of a man on a mission, who is doing what he feels to be right. The result is that you walk away from the film feeling that you’ve just met a real person and not a manufactured man of god.
Perhaps Herzog was drawn to Scott because of this "man on a mission, who is doing what he feels to be right" aesthetic, one eerily similar to that of Klaus Kinski's mad conquisdator character in Herzog's classic feature film Aquirre, the Wrath of God (1972).
San Francisco's answer to New York City's Spy Magazine was The Nose, and years ago they ran a terrific feature on the world's angriest televangelist (which I also stumbled across while packing!), as shown below.
(October 23, 2013) - The northwest corner of Baltimore and Calvert streets, where the main office of the SunTrust Bank now stands, was the setting for one of Bob Dylan's best songs and one of Baltimore's worst moments. Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" - recorded 50 years ago today (it appears on the The Times They Are A-Changin' LP) - is a moving, although somewhat inaccurate (call it poetic license), account of a real-life incident that occurred there on the night of February 9, 1963, in what was then the Emerson Hotel.
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll With a cane that he twirled 'round his diamond-ringed finger At a Baltimore hotel, society gathering And the cops was called in and his weapon took from him And they rode him in custody down to the station And charged William Zanzinger with first-degree murder
It's true that William Zantzinger (Dylan inexplicably dropped the "t" in his song), a 24-year-old white tobacco farmer from Charles County, was attending a society ball at the Emerson Hotel that night. And, by all accounts, he was drunk, disorderly, and offensive, especially with his lightweight carnival cane, which he liked to tap people with to get their attention. And it's also true that he struck a black waitress, Hattie Carroll, once above the right shoulder with that cane when she didn't fetch his bourbon and ginger ale as fast as he would have liked it.
Illustration by Tom Chalkley (City Paper, December 7, 1992)
Though she collapsed moments later, she neither fell "under a rain of blows," as some press reports claimed, nor was she killed by that single stroke of William Zantzinger's flimsy cane. Rather, it was the inhumanity of the racial slur that accompanied this blow - "You black bitch" Zantzinger bellowed - that triggered, in the medical examiner's words, a "tremendous emotional upsurge" in the 51-year-old mother of nine (not ten as referenced in Dylan's song).
"Matron Felled by Cane in 'Old Plantation' Setting (Baltimore Afro-American)
Given that Hattie Carroll was not in the best of health (she suffered from arteriosclerosis and hypertension) and was described by her friends as accutely sensitive, most likely it was the shock of William Zantzinger's words that brought on the cerebral hemorrhage that claimed her life eight hours later at Mercy Hospital.
On August 28, 1963, Judge D. Kenneth McLaughlin sentenced William Zantzinger to six months' imprisonment, declaring, "We find that Hattie Carroll's death was not due solely to disease, but that it was caused by the defendant's verbal insults, coupled with an actual assault, and that he is guilty of manslaughter."
Those were the facts, but they were dwarfed in significance by what the case had some to symbolize in those nascent days of the civil rights movement. To the press, to civil-rights leaders, and to a folk singer in New York City, William Zantzinger represented the plantation-owner mentality of the still lingering antebellum South, while Hattie Carroll represented the oppression of all underprivileged people, regardless of race, creed, or religion. Details didn't matter in what became, in Sun reporter David Simon's words, a "morality play." (Simon's excellent analysis, "The Case of Hattie Carroll," appeared in the February 7, 1988, Sun Magazine.)
You'd think being the villain in a morality play would be enough infamy to last anybody a lifetime, but William Zantzinger managed to outdo himself and was in the news again in late 1991 when he pleaded guilty to 50 misdemeanor counts of unfair and deceptive trade practices for collecting rent on run-down Charles County properties he no longer owned. Before the county seized Patuxent Woods shanties from Zantzinger in 1986 for failing to pay taxes on them, his record as a landlord was far from exemplary. Patuxent Woods was a virtual rural slum, with dirt roads and no indoor plumbing. In January of 1992, Zantzinger was sentenced to 18 months in jail (he spent only nights in jail), fined $62,000, and ordered to perform 2,400 hours of community service for local groups that advocate low-cost housing. Having lived down his image as a racist plantation owner, Zanzinger managed to gain new notoriety as its modern equivalent - the slumlord.
(Portions of this article originally appeared in my "Raising Cane" contribution to the December 7, 1992 City Paper article "Baltimore Babylon.")
For more on this story, see WYPR's podcast "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" ("Maryland Morning," October 23, 2013), which includes Dylan biographer Howard Sounes' 30-minute BBC Radio 4 documentary about the song. Sounes' Dylan biography Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (2001) is the best I've read to date and his BBC report is fantastic; not only did Sounes track down William Zantzinger's notorious cane, but listeners get to listen to Zantzinger "cursing Dylan unrepentedly" in what is believed to be his only recorded interview before his death at age 69 on January 3, 2009.
My girlfriend Amy and I are still unpacking boxes from our September move into a new house. We packed a lot of junk, of course, that we are having second thoughts about holding onto in our new, smaller digs. But there are also some legitimate treasures buried in all those Home Depot and Extra Space Storage boxes. Like Amy's 1984 diary/journal in which she saved a City Paper clipping that mentioned her and her former husband, the late musical legend Mark Harp (1957-2004), as "Kitty kultists" talking about their Hello Kitty collections.
Amy was very excited to find this clipping, pasted in between her exemplary cursive handwritting (a beautiful thing to observe, if you're a Cursive Cultist!).
Amy is vaclempt after finding her name published in the "City Paper."
"Wow," I said, scratching my head. "That sounds like something I would have written up back in my days at the City Paper. I remember I did a story on Hello Kitty back in the '80s."
Amy pulled out her journal, and lo and behold, it was written by me! I recall I went down to the big East Coast Sanrio outlet in Tysons Corner, Va., to research the story and I have a vague memory of visiting Mark and Amy's Charles Village apartment at some point (it may have been during a party) and being impressed by their Sanrio collection. Amy doesn't remember that, but then again this was almost 30 years ago and we are now AARP members with sometimes faulty memories. (Like, we've been together eight years, but we only vaguely knew each other back in the day as acquaintances because we were part of the same Punk-New Wave social scene that frequented clubs like the Marble Bar and Galaxy Ballroom. Then we didn't see each other for decades until we ran into each other at a musical tribute-wake for Mark Harp in January 2005.)
It may seem trite today to see a story about the Hello Kitty phenomenon - after all Sanrio products are seemingly available everywhere one looks and for every imaginable use (from stickers and pens to TVs and even vibrators) - but the first Sanrio shop in America didn't open until 1976 (and that was in San Francisco), so Kitty curios were still a relatively new thing in 1984.
The full article, called "Hello, Good Buy: Pet Peeves," appears below. (Naturally there were factual errors, which fact-checking proofreader extraordinaire Amy clarifed in her cursive script comments; to wit, she was asked how old her kids were at a Highlandtown store selling Hello Kitty items, not in Tysons Corner. Geeze, everyone's a critic! Did I mention I was a hack writer, Ames?)
Even if you don't follow world soccer (the real "football"), you have to applaud the after-effects of the French national team's dramatic qualification for the 2014 World Cup finals last Tuesday, following an improbable come from behind, two-leg playoff win against Ukraine, 3-2 on aggregate (0-2, 3-0). Apparently the libido of the nation was riding on the (soon-to-be) climatic outcome of the dramatic victory. Following are the titillating updates from the online edition of my favorite footy mag, World Soccer. French weather woman does indeed strip naked (World Soccer Daily, 21/11/2013)
Doira Tillier, a weather girl on Canal+’s Le Grand Journal programme, who made a promise on Tuesday’s show that if France beat the Ukraine to reach the World Cup she would read her weather report on Wednesday in the nude, has come good on the pledge – although perhaps not in the way that her myriad admirers would have chosen. Running around a field sporting nothing but a pair of boots, Ms. Tillier did her report without any clothes on, although viewers, even those who freezed the footage frame-by-frame, were unable to make out any detail.
A French porn producer was left red-faced after France defied the odds to qualify for the World Cup finals on Tuesday.
Marc Dorcel offered football fans free access to his X-rated website if the national team turned around a 2-0 first leg deficit and defeated Ukraine in the World Cup play-off. After a 3-0 win for France fans were clicking on Dorcel.com expecting to celebrate the win in some style.
However, such was the demand that Dorcel’s server crashed under the weight of traffic. And that was before French duo Franck Ribery and Karim Benzema had logged on to peruse the barely legal section.
But, frustrated French fans will get a second chance to take advantage of Dorcel’s offer with the producer promising to keep his pledge when the site was up and running again.
He tweeted ‘Dorcelvision.com exploded on the whistle. Mail your details to lesbleuslontfait@dorcel.com to receive your film tomorrow.’
Naked weather forecasters, porn on demand, it would seem that the libido of the entire French nation was riding on the outcome of Tuesday’s game.
The Walking Dead now talk - and have library cards!
It's been a hard day's night, and I've been been working like a dog dealing with a bizarro alternate universe of humans known as library patrons. Though I was trained as a journalist, lately my missives about my job sound more like science-fiction prose describing the far reaches of the cosmos. I swear, I can't make this stuff up...
The Scorpion Lady A woman came in tonight asking about the status of her movie "hold".
"Remember that one I was talking about?" she said, assuming that I could remember an alleged transaction from months ago and that I hadn't helped anyone else with "holds" in the interim. I replied that, sorry, I didn't recall it. (I love it when people you helped a long time ago come in and say stuff like "That book I wanted come in yet?" like it was yesterday; Janice, a woman I last saw two years ago, when I had security escort her out of the building for pulling plugs out of a public computer ("It's OK, I took an online course and am an expert in computers" she assured me, to which I replied "Great, practice on your own personal computer!"), actually asked me that recently.) Of course, she didn't have a library card but, exhibiting a modus operandus I've noticed in many idiot savants, had memorized her library card number. And, of course, she had no holds. (Maybe she placed a hold in the astral plane. Who knows?) She was looking for Woody Allen's Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) because she claimed her sister's house in Ellicott City appears in it - but she didn't have a VCR, a DVD player, a computer, or a TV set to watch it on.
I told Scorpion Lady that a) we don't own a copy b) no library in the state has a copy available for loan (though I placed an interlibrary loan request out-of-state for her) and c) we don't have viewing stations and, no, if she does score a copy she can't come down to the library to watch it at the PC on my desk. She then whined that she wasted a trip riding the bus down to the library "around all those smelly people." I suggested perhaps she should call first next time. But, natch, she doesn't have a phone.
She then asked if I would sign her up for Netflix though she doesn't have any platform to watch anything she would get from them. Is it just me, or was she kinda needy?
(Upon reflection, I feel kinda guilty that I didn't use my credit card to sign her up for a Netflix account or invite her over to my house to watch this movie, as I know how important it must be to see a 10-second shot of her sister's house in it.)
I thought it was rather odd that the New York City-based Woody Allen would have shot a film in Maryland - that is, the old pre-World Tour (Barcelona, London, Paris, Rome, San Francisco) Woody of the Noughties - so I subsequently looked up the film on the Internet Movie database and learned that The Curse of the Scorpion Lady was filmed in New York (natch), Long Island and Los Angeles. Maybe her sister moved. Maybe her sister moved to My Sister's Place. Who knows?
The Snake Man
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Then some rough-looking guy with wild hair and a cigarette stub tucked behind his ear (who reminded me of Taxi's Reverend Jim Ignatowski, minus the charm) and wearing a mud-encrusted camouflage jacket and baggy, decomposing pants, came in 5 minutes before closing.
"Ya got any DVDs about Snakeskinplesskin?" he mumbled as he leaned over my desk. "I'm sorry," I replied, trying to deconstruct the phrase "Snakeskin something-or-other,""Snakeskin, what was that word?" "Snakeskin Plesskin," he re-mumbled, slower this time, with a look that seemed to add "You Ee-di-ot!" "I'm unfamiliar with that term," I said, adding, "We have one VHS tape on snakes and reptiles, but that's about it." (Yikes! I didn't even mention Snakes on a Plane.) Wait, maybe he said Rumpletstiltskin? "No man! You mean you haven't ever seen Escape from New York City (sic)?!?" he shouted. "I can't believe you're a librarian, man, and you haven't seen Escape from New YorkCity? What, the library doesn't carry it because, what, it's too violent or something?"
"Oh, you want Escape from New York? Sorry, I'm afraid we don't have it," I replied, now comprehending that he was referring to Kurt Russell's eye-patch-wearing character "Snake" from John Carpenter's 1981 cult film, which also spawned the sequel Escape from L.A. (1996). "I cannot believe you've never seen it man, and you call yourself a librarian, man!" Rev. Jim snarled. (I made a mental note to give him bonus points for pronouncing my profession correctly, instead of the "lie-barian" pronunciation 99% of my patrons employ to describe "lie-berry" staff.)
"Sorry about that, I'll get right on it," I said. "I'll add it to my Netflix bucket list."
"So what do you watch, like pornos, I guess?" he snapped dismissively. "Sure, but I also watch a variety of things," I countered. "Like what? Like Mary Poppins or Doctor Doolittle?" (I sensed this was also said in a dismissive tone. I got the distinct vibe that Rev. Jim didn't care for family entertainment.) "No, all kinds of things." "Like what, like name me one thing you've seen, man!" "OK, Blade Runner."
"Oh that," Snake Man snorted. "Isn't that that freaky movie where all these freaks are running around with machetes cutting shit up and - " "No," I cut him off, "Not at all. It's a futuristic sci-fi movie starring Harrison Ford. No machetes." (Was he possibly think of the Danny Trejo-starring action spoof Machete?)
Stumped momentarily, Rev. Jim now reverted back to Conspiracy Theory Mode (public libraries are "the government," after all, man!). "So you're saying the library doesn't have Escape from New York City (sic) because it's too violent or something?" "No, I'm not saying anything other than we don't appear to own a copy of that film, but we probably should. I'll see if our distributor has it." I looked it up and found that, indeed, it was carried by our distributor and placed it in a suggested purchase cart. I told Rev. Jim that I had placed a suggested purchase of Escape from New York for him. "It's Escape from New York City, man, not Escape from New York!" he spat out contemptuously.
"Well, you can call it anything you want," I countered, "But the named listed on the poster, DVD and the Internet Movie Database is Escape from New York. See?" With this I turned my PC monitor around so he could see the cover of the DVD. I sensed this encounter was turning into Monty Python's "Argument Clinic" skit. This guy was obviously looking for a fight, verbal or physical, and, of course, what better place to take out one's aggressions and frustrations than at the library, where one can tangle with those power brokers, The Mild-Mannered Librarians? (Forget the Bilderberg Group, librarians rule the world! Didn't everyone see those Noah Wyle Librarian movies?) "Yeah well..." His voice trailed off before he came back with his stinging zinger. "Nice sweater, man...That's a [snorting] nice sweater." He was pointing at my Argyle sweater vest. I guess he thought it was laughable compared to his Sunny Surplus-style commando gear. I was waiting for the inevitable "faggot ass preppy" or other dis as a followup (yes, I've heard every imaginable dis regarding my sexual orientation from patrons, over the years - I'm so glad they take an interest with my social life!) "Thanks!" I replied. "Nice camo jacket on you." (It was tres Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver; all it was missing was the blood and splattered brain remnants.) Flustered, Rev. Jim now took his case to the security guard who was announcing, as the lights went out, that the library was now closed. I heard him rant about the outrage of the library not carrying Escape from New York. Officer Greg came over to me and smiled. "We see everything here, don't we Tom?" Unfortunately, we do, we do. Watch Escape from New York trailer. Prophet Man Oh, almost forgot Prophet Man, who came in earlier in the day. Like many of our road scholars, he was a would-be Religious Studies scholar (they're always the best and the brightest! No, really.). Just as Cornel West has to preface everybody's name with a "Brother" or "Sister" (which I find most annoying), this gentleman, newly converted to Islam but seeking out all sides of The Greatest Story Ever Told, had to preface everything with "Prophet."
"Do you have anything on the prophet Muhammad? Do you have anything on the prophet Jesus? Do you have anything on the prophet Abraham? Do you have anything on the prophet Moses?" The only prophet he didn't want was the Prophet Chuck, aka Chuck Prophet, the American singer-songwriter guitarist formerly of Green on Red, even though he has an album called Temple Beautiful. Another day, more brain cells lost on the front lines.
If you ever have a question about how to do, well, anything, just ask a librarian. We're here to help the helpless.
The answer to all your queries, all your problems, and all of life's mysteries is just a phone call away and operators are standing by to take your call.
Ready? Grab a pencil and some paper and follow just these steps. Aren't you glad you asked?
Spell out your full name, surname first. Fill in the circles completely with a No. 2 pencil. Make sure your marks are heavy and dark.
Enter your five-digit PIN number. If you do not own a touch-tone phone, hold for operator assistance. If you do not hear an alarm within sixty seconds, force the door open. If the door won’t open, try closing it first.
Insert tab A into slot 6. Color in any space marked “3” with cornflower blue. Do not put all your eggs in one (1) basket. Do not pound square pegs into round holes. Guide them in gently. Think outside the box. Then fill in boxes 7a(a)-7a(c) with your age, address, and conception of the afterlife.
Think, write, revise. Lather, rinse, repeat. Before you begin assembly, locate the fissile isotope plutonium-239. Determine its expiration date, then predetermine your own.
Check at least once a month, perhaps in the shower. Search carefully for a hard, pea-size growth. Remove the hard drive with a flathead screwdriver. Phillips-head screwdrivers are awkward tools and untrustworthy lovers, like the Danish.
To avoid the appearance of sexist language in your writing, try to pluralize, stylize, or just tell lies. Always replace “he” with “he or she.” Also replace “she” with “he or she,” unless preceded by the phrase “he or.”
If you are travelling with a child under the age of twelve, strap your oxygen mask to your face first, then put your child’s oxygen mask on your face. If your oxygen supply runs low, photosynthesize. If you experience technical difficulties, weep softly, with prudence. When finished, configure the plutonium-239 into a small “pit” packed with explosives. This pit will compress symmetrically into a supercritical mass when detonated. Be careful not to apply this product, or yourself, in high humidity or at abnormal altitudes.
Just say “No!” If you speak Spanish, say “¡No!”
Take a deep breath. Think about slowly moving clouds that are white, like wedding dresses and Deborah’s legs in the rain. Don’t worry about shark attacks, terror attacks, or the inheritance tax.
Do not stare directly at the sun. Do not exceed the recommended dosage of anything, except Vitamin C and meaningful emotional contact.
In the rare event that a mature adult of the human species confronts you, stretch your arms above your head to make yourself as tall as possible. Shout strong commands with a strong, commanding shout. If you are assaulted, fall down and play dead. Do not play dead for more than seventy-two hours, or you will die.
Pause. Pause again.
Insert your card into the machine and determine if you are happy or sad. If you are unsure, ask a loved one, but the likely answer is a combination of four to six numerals. Make sure to refrigerate after opening. A sulfurous, or “rotten egg,” smell is a sign that something is wrong. Notify transit authorities.
Take a moment to ease your mind, stretch your legs, and exercise your Second Amendment rights. Review your work thus far. Is this the best you can do? Why won’t you settle down and grow up? Why must you constantly confuse ranch dressing and Russian dressing? Why did Deborah wait through twelve years of marriage before leaving to pursue her career as an office temp?
Seventeen syllables is a haiku. Eighteen syllables is an unauthorized withdrawal of company resources and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
Studies show that Monday afternoons are optimal. Engage the employee in a room near his desk. Compliment his kinfolk and establish a light, collegial atmosphere with an icebreaker—perhaps a gender-sensitive joke about mulatto children. Use positive inflection and never say the words “you’re fired.” Talk about company cutbacks. Talk about hope, about faith, about weather cycles, about anything other than testicular cancer and corporate liability. Call the employee “a real trouper.” If he or she looks sad, talk about sports. Everybody likes sports. Except, of course, golf.
If the one who is “it” touches you, you are now “it.”
The addition of tritium will boost fissile power. Now that the plutonium is properly packed, the device is functional. Carefully consider other dieting options before starting a thermonuclear war or ending a thermonuclear peace. Remember, violence is not an alternative. Violence is not an answer. Unless the question is “What is an eight-letter word for something painful that is neither an alternative nor an answer?”
Be mindful that bees smell fear but not toxic chemical defoliants. Humans, like most life-forms (lobsters, lichen), can smell neither. God can smell both fear and defoliants, because God is all-smelling. If only Deborah’s orthodox Lutheran upbringing hadn’t closed her mind to this revelation, widening the schism between us. If only she could have diverted her energies from stapling and faxing to refreshing the stagnant adolescence of our marriage. If only she weren’t Danish.
No, no! Refrigerate after opening!
Put your left leg in.
Take your left leg out.
Put your left leg in—
·a. Shake it all about. If you experience feelings of “warmth,” “uncontrollable laughter,” or “death,” the process is operating properly.
·b. Bathe, floss, and move your bowels daily. Do not fall in love this often.
I was momentarily confused when I first read a City Paperexcerpt from John Waters's latest book, Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), about his encounter with a "rogue librarian." As a rogue librarian myself, I thought: how cool! Then I realized that "Bernice" was (like most things in life we wish for) too good to be true: this librarian was an entirely fictional creation - though the lewd pulp paperbacks she collected were every bit as real as the doggy-doo Divine scarfed down in Pink Flamingos. Even John Waters can't make up titles as delightfully demented as Saddle Shoe Sex Kitten or Freakout on Sunset Strip: Fags, Freaks and the Famous Turn the Street Into a Hippy Hell
As a collector of such titles myself, I knew the best thing about vintage sleaze paperbacks from the 1960s are their amazing covers, those era-defining "swatches of erotic eye-candy" that are so well-documented in Feral House's eye-popping collection Sin-A-Rama. So when I read that Bernice was collecting remaindered pulp titles with the covers ripped off because she read sleaze for the literature - I knew this was pure fiction!
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Admittedly books like Transvestite (which I am convinced was Ed Wood, Jr. writing as "Harry Guggeheim"), Sunset Strip Sex Agent and Nude Man in Jazz Town are good cover-to-cover reads whose narratives match the artistry of their come-on titles and covers - after all, many titles were penned under pseudonyms by later-respected authors like Donald Westlake, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison and Lawrence Block trying to pay the rent in their early, pre-success days - but most of these sleaze pulps feature improbable plots leading to fairly tame (by today's gonzo porn standards) intimate encounters. Still, I was impressed by Waters's knowledge and love of the genre. I only wish his librarian was real so we could hang out and trade books!
Following is the Rogue Librarian excerpt that appeared in the June 4, 2014 City Paper.
Last Chance, Colorado, may have been the first chance I’ve had to be happy naked in public, but the carnival must move on and so must I. Before the whole troupe wakes up I sneak a note inside Polk-A-Dotty and Buster’s trailer thanking them for introducing me to a new kind of living theater, the closest I’ll ever get to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty . . . only nice. You can never have too many careers, I’ve always said, and now I write them, “If the book doesn’t turn out or Fruitcake underperforms, I’ll be back to ‘spin for my supper.’ ”
The sun is coming up and there’s no such thing as rush-hour traffic in this part of the country but, yet again (!), the very first car that approaches pulls over. The problem is, how do I get in? The entire vehicle, a beat-up yellow eighties Chevy Citation, is completely filled with books—every kind imaginable—hardcovers, trade paperbacks, but especially mass- market editions, some missing their covers. The passenger seat is piled so high I can’t even see who’s behind the wheel. Slowly, like a jigsaw puzzle being assembled in reverse, I see a face as she throws the books in the back, under the seats, even in her lap. “Sorry,” the rather haggard looking woman in her late sixties, with the weakest chin I’ve ever seen in my life, mutters, “I like to read.”
“I can see that,” I answer good-naturedly as I jump in, pick books off my seat, and then pile them back in my lap. “I like to read, too,” I say, taking a gander at the eye-popping cover art of the vintage sex paperback Teen Girls Who Are Assaulted by Animals.“This one is amazing,” I say, wondering what the editorial meeting at the publisher’s could have been like to green- light this title. Here’s a niche audience I hadn’t imagined. “All books are amazing,” she corrects me with a passion. “Are you a librarian?” I ask cheerfully, knowing, after being the keynote speaker for several of their conferences, how wild librarians can be. “Not officially . . . ,” she answers with practiced bravery. “I was . . . ,” she confides, “and then something happened and I wasn’t.” Oh. “I’m John,” I introduce myself, trying to change the subject away from her obviously painful past. “They call me Bernice,” she answers without fanfare, “and I read your last book. I loved the chapter ‘Bookworm,’ but you’re too ‘literarily correct’ for my tastes.”
Before I can stick up for my published reading recommendations, she suddenly brakes for a car that swerves around some tire rubble on the highway, and a huge pile of cheap paperbacks stacked pack- rat style in the backseat collapses on top of me. I pick off Saddle Shoe Sex Kitten, Some Like It Hard, and Freakout on Sunset Strip, with the amazing politically incorrect subtitle Fags, Freaks and the Famous Turn the Street into a Hippy Hell.
“They’re not for me,” she explains as she pulls off I-70 onto a rural road; “they’re for my book club readers.” Before I can protest that I can’t go off the interstate, she tells me, “Don’t worry, I’ll take you back to the highway.” We cut back into an even less traveled country road, turn the corner, and see a Tobacco Road–style hut constructed entirely out of paperback books missing their front covers. The owner has shellacked the books to make them semi-weatherproof, but the elements have not been kind—the volumes, soaked through many times from rain, are swollen, tattered, and can’t offer much in the way of protection. “Publishers don’t want cheap paperbacks returned when they don’t sell,” Bernice explains. “The newsstand managers are supposed to rip off the covers and turn those in and they get their refund. The retail outlets are expected to then just throw away the books, but I rescue them from this biblioclasm and redistribute the volumes to alternative readers at the lowest end of the used-book market. I know it’s hard to imagine, but a few very dedicated collectors only want books with torn-off covers. It’s these specialized readers I serve. I am not alone. Flea-market vendors, paper-recycling workers, relatives of deceased dirty-book collectors, we are united in a mission to do what libraries cannot: bring the customer the lowest of the low in literature.
“Ah, there’s Cash,” she says as a skinny, grubby fortyish-year-old white guy with a potbelly and a Prince Valiant haircut comes out of his self- styled reading room. I quickly realize by “Cash” she means her customer’s name, not actual money. Her books are, of course, free. “Cash is a very specific customer,” she explains. “His books must be soft-core and pre-porn, with a missing cover done by a collectible artist. He then actually reads these smutty volumes, writes endless critiques of the writer’s style, which he never allows anyone else to read, and then uses the ‘read’ book as a building block for another room in his shantytown abode.”
“Hi, Bernice,” shouts Cash in some sort of regional accent too obscure for me to identify. “Hello, sir,” she says with a literary grin, “this is my friend John.” Cash completely ignores me, so Bernice just goes into her routine. “I got some good ones for you today,” she promises as Cash’s eyes light up and he licks his lips in anticipation. “Here you go,” she teases, “She’ll Get Hers by John Plunkett.” “With a missing cover by Rafael de Soto,” Cash yells back with postmodern literary enthusiasm. “I remember that one, Cash,” Bernice reminisces like the specialist she is; “that was great pulp art but it’s gone now!” “Who wants to go to an art gallery?! I want to read!” yells Cash as he grabs the volume and hugs it to his chest in literary fetishism. “How about this one?” tempts Bernice, holding up a yellowing paperback with both the front and the back binding ripped off . “Remember the pulp jacket with the sexy lady on the couch clutching the pillow like her lover?” she quizzes. “Restlessby Greg Hamilton,” Cash shouts back like he’s on a quiz show, “with cover art by Paul Rader. And I’m glad the cover is gone. I read these books, Bernice, I don’t look at them! I read every word until I understand perfectly what the author was saying just to me; the last reader these volumes will ever have.” Bernice hands him the damaged volume and he grabs it with a scary gratitude. “See you next Thursday, Cash,” Bernice promises, and with that, we’re back in the car and off to the next outsider reader.
“I’m no judge of what people read as long as they read,” explains Bernice once we’re on the road. “Are all your books dirty ones?” I ask with great curatorial respect. “No,” she answers proudly, “I’ve got true crime, too. A lot of libraries won’t carry the really gruesome ones. Just like bookstores, they discriminate—putting the true crime sections way in the back of the store. Hidden. Near the gay section.” Before I can agree she gives me a sudden look of traumatic desperation that stops me in my tracks. “Believe me,” she whispers sadly as we suddenly pull into the driveway of a suburban ranch house, “I know about censorship.”
Out comes Mrs. Adderly, a most unlikely matronly true crime reader still dressed in her housecoat. “Hi, Bernice. I’m glad you’re here. I got in a fight down at the library just yesterday. They take my taxes, why can’t I have a say in what books the library buys?” “Hi, I’m John,” I butt in. “I thought the library had to get you a book if you ask for it.” “Oh, they say they do,” Mrs. Adderly answers without missing a beat, “but they lie! I happen to be obsessed with ‘womb raiders.’ Are you familiar with that genre?” she asks me point-blank. “You mean women who tell their husbands they’re pregnant when they’re not and then follow real pregnant ones, kill them, cut out their babies and take them home claiming they’ve just given birth?” I reply. “That’s the ones,” acknowledges Bernice, impressed I’m so well-informed in this specialized field. “Well, I read Lullaby and Goodnight by D. T. Hughes,” Mrs. Adderly continues, “but there’s another one I want. Hush Little Baby, by Jim Carrier, where the ‘raider’ cuts out the baby with the mother’s car keys and the baby actually lives! Well, this literary snob of a librarian says to me when I ask if she has the book, ‘There’s no need to know about somebody that ugly.’”
“Yes, there is!” I yell in outrage, completely agreeing with Mrs. Adderly’s anger. “The public needs to know,” I rant, “that when you’re pregnant, strangers are following your every step, ready to jump out and cut out your baby with your car keys! Womb raiders are everywhere.” “Exactly!” agrees Mrs. Adderly, thrilled to have someone else in her corner. Bernice gets a sly grin on her face and whips out a mint-condition bound galley of this very title and hands it over. “Oh, Bernice,” Mrs. Adderly gushes, “you know how to make a true crime buff happy. Thank you from the bottom of my black little heart.”
We’re off. I’m impressed. Bernice turns on the radio and we hear that delightful little country song “Swingin’ Down the Lane” by Jerry Wallace and merrily sing along, harmonizing over the instrumental bridge between verses. I continue picking through the books on the floor by my feet and laugh at One Hole Town, a hilariously titled soft-core vintage gay stroke book. “You want that one?” she asks with generosity. “Sure,” I say, mentally adding this rare title to my collection of cheesy gay-sex paperbacks. “It would go right along with my ‘chicken’ volumes,” I tell her. “You mean titles with the word chicken in them?” she asks immediately, understanding my oddball bibliophile specialty. “Yes, I’ve got Uncle’s Little Chicken, Trickin’ the Chicken, Chicken for the Hardhat, even Chain Gang Chicken.” “I know them well,” she announces with bibliographical respect.
“And you, Bernice,” I gently pry, “what kind of terrible books do you collect?” She freezes, suddenly protective of her most private scholarly taste, but then seems eager to have someone in whom she can confide. “The novelization of porn parody movies,” she admits with great pride. “It’s a small genre, but one that is growing in importance,” she explains with deep knowledge of her field. “I tried to introduce these specialized volumes to the general public when I was head librarian in my hometown of Eagle. But Colorado is such a backward state! Trouble started as soon as I displayed Splendor in the Ass and Homo Alone with the covers out instead of spine in. Busybody little prudes noticed and made a big deal out of it, but I stood strong against censorship. Porn parody titles need to be discovered and celebrated. I was vilified in both the local and the national press, but I didn’t care! I fought back! I passed out valuable, extremely rare copies of Clitty Clitty Bang Bang to any high school reader in the library who asked for it. Satire needs to be taught! These youngsters loved Clitty but I was fired! I called the Kids’ Right to Read and the National Coalition Against Censorship organizations, but they wouldn’t help me. I became a scapegoat for the humor-impaired.”
Before I can offer my unbridled support, she pulls her car over to the I-70W entrance ramp and we are buried in sliding paperback books. With great concern and kindness she asks gently, “Do you have the Twelve Inches series?” “Yes,” I murmur in excitement, trying to stack Bernice’s volumes back up in some kind of order. “I’ve got Twelve Inches, Twelve Inches with a Vengeance,Twelve Inches Around the World.” “But do you have Twelve Inches in Peril?” she demands with excitement, whipping the title out from inside her glove compartment and holding it up like the Holy Grail. “No!” I shout with rabid delight, quivering in reverse literary excitement. We look at each other in our love of disreputable books and she hands it over, completing my collection. “Thank you, Bernice,” I say in heartfelt appreciation, caressing this title like a sexual partner. “You must go now, John,” she says with sudden concern. “I can’t be exposed. My readers will continue to hide me. They know. They know I’m the best damn alternative librarian in the country.” “You should be proud, Bernice,” I say as I get out, bow in respect, and blow her a kiss goodbye. “Run,” she says with urgency; “run to read!” But where do you run to in Parachute, Colorado?
I ran into a friend at Sunday's HonFest in Hampden - where thankfully there hardly any faux hons parading around to annoy me - who saw my Brazil jersey and said, "I can't get into soccer, all those guys running around passing the ball, it's boring!" Ever the diplomat, I acknowledged "it's not for everyone." But in truth, it really is for everyone, the world over - it's just we Americans that are colonial hold-outs from the game the Brits invented. C'mpn, they're even are selling Mr. Boh World Cup t-shirts at Boh Gear now (I saw two Ecuadorean girls, wearing their country's beautiful blue-and-white futbol kits, buy two, in fact) , in addition to their Ravens and Orioles and Terps gear. 'Nuff said! Following is the confession of a World Cup neophyte, Jason Gay, who in today's Wall Street Journal put into words why resistance to the Cup - that "electric collision of national pride and the planet's most popular sport compressed into an exhausting but riveting monthlong saga" - is futile. - Almost Hip Guy
Look: I'm not going to lie to you. Never. I guess I could try to bluff my way through this, try to convince you from here, 10 airborne hours from New York City via sumptuous upgrade from economy to economy comfort—neither comfortable nor economic, as it turns out—that I am a true futebol obsessive, with the game packed deep inside my bones. I wish I could tell you, in a hushed tone rich with emotion, that this beautiful game had both lifted and broken my heart, and my father's heart, and my grandfather's heart, and the heart of Zidane, our beloved family dog. That would be great. I wish I could tell you soccer makes me cry. I really wish I could tell you we had a family dog named Zidane. But I can't. Not yet.
The truth is I'm still new to the whole World Cup experience. I had a couple of days at South Africa 2010 but I still feel green and a little confused. I'm ready to be captivated, however. On Sunday morning I woke up in Rio at our Journal WC 2014 headquarters (medium glam) not far from Copacabana beach (actual glam), and before I had my a.m. coffee, I was jarred by a noisy ruckus in the streets. I looked out the window to see Argentina fans marching and singing in white-and-light-blue jerseys. It was barely 9 in the morning. Argentina's game with Bosnia and Herzegovina at Maracanã Stadium was not for another 10 hours. Back home, if a bunch of Jets fans came parading past my apartment at 9 a.m., I would take my family down to the basement and barricade the door. But this was fantastic. It made me want to run outside and join.
This mania is what makes the World Cup great, what makes the Cup the Cup—the electric collision of national pride and the planet's most popular sport compressed into an exhausting but riveting monthlong saga. It's ugly business, too—Brazil is torn over this Cup, disgusted over the grotesque sports spending in a country that needs much more than shiny stadia. Protests have happened; protests are expected; there are hard and important questions about what will be left when the soccer and the world leaves. Of course, FIFA, the sport's blundering governing body, knows it sells an addictive product, and it counts on the public to set any caution aside as soon as the Cup begins. And then the Cup begins, and it is indeed hard not to love. This surely makes me a sucker, part of the problem.
But it's intoxicating in so many ways, especially this Cup, in a dynamic country already confirmed as soccer-mad, holder of five World Cup titles, and among the favorites in 2014. I have seen enough of this Cup to know that the true soccer-heads are thrilled with the early games, which have been thrilling even to an untrained eye—upsets, aggression, goals galore, often in rapid succession. Whoever complains there is not enough scoring in soccer is not watching this soccer. Also: I am reasonably sure the Netherlands could beat the Orlando Magic.
Controversy is a inexorable part of any World Cup, and it is here in both serious and absurd form. Brazil's contentious Cup began with a discussion of the contentious Cup two contentious Cups down the road, in Qatar, in 2022, and the debate of whether or not it should be moved someplace with fewer logistical issues, like Saturn. Less grave were the predictable referee disputes—a penalty kick awarded to Brazil in its opener over Croatia, handed out by the referee for contact that—at worst—resembled a tender cuddle. Later, Croatia coach Niko Kovac, taking a restrained view, wondered if his team should just "give up and go home." France has complained that drones may have been spying on their practices. On Sunday, the robots sent a peace offering to France, awarding a goal-line tech score to Les Bleus in their 3-0 win over Honduras.
Like the French national team, traveling around Brazil can be unpredictable and sometimes exasperating; when you ask a worried out-of-towner when you should leave to go to the airport, you are told you should have left two months ago. I've been lucky—after the Brazil opener in São Paulo, I went breezily on to Rio. That afternoon I sat behind a taxi driver who watched the Uruguay-Costa Rica game from a phone suctioned below the rearview mirror. When it rang, he picked it up and told his wife to not distract him.
On Saturday night, I went to the crowded fan fest to watch the Italy-England game played up north in Manaus. This is a game that would be a big loud deal in my Brooklyn neighborhood back home, and it was a big loud deal here, too; the Inglaterra fans showered the crowd with Coca-Cola cups after Daniel Sturridge's first-half goal. But the victory went to Italy, which had the second-half gas in the Amazonian heat. Sunday night I rushed off to Argentina-Bosnia at legendary Maracanã, the stadium stacked with joyous fans, soccer icon Lionel Messi on the field below. On Monday, the U.S. team would make its debut against Ghana.
It's early here. Pacing feels essential. Imagine a Super Bowl after a Super Bowl after a Super Bowl until you have counted for a month. But the World Cup is manic from the start. Heartbreak and contemplation comes later. We are now four days in and I have yet to hear a stray remark about the U.S. Open or the Heat and the Spurs or even the Mets. A lot of major sporting events like to claim they're the center of the sports universe. This feels like the center of the sports universe. There's nothing like a World Cup. Even a newcomer can detect that.
Image may be NSFW.
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