Ebony and Irony

I hadn't realized what an utter piece of garbage our old turntable mixer (above, right) was until I got a chance to play with our new one...yep!
New one!
This morning there was a piece of gear in the studio that I'd never seen before- a shiny DJ mixer! Woot! Fancy!
No one had sent out an email or called me, so I was surprised as holy heck to see it...I cued up a record, pressed a few buttons, plugged in the headphones...
Cool!
It has a much better sound than the old one, I could hear the difference straightaway- it has long been a source of considerable consternation to me that my records sound better at home than at the station... why is that?...it's the mixer, duh!

There isn't much that makes me happier than new audio gear.
I was clapping my hands together in glee.
Serious glee, I'm tellin' ya.
The sort of joy that transcends dignity.
*Squeal!*

I pointed the new gizmo out to the early morning DJ, but he doesn't play vinyl. He didn't care. He hadn't even noticed it, his loss...I really wanted to share this happy moment with somebody...but who to tell?

Voila!

In walks one of our nighttime DJs.

"Hey man!", I said,"Have you seen this? This new mixer is cool!"

"Um, yeah. I came in to switch it."

"Switch it?"

"Yeah. It's mine. I left it here last night."

So with under a minute to spare, he replaced the new mixer with the old one.
I cued up another record.
It sounded like shit.

The New Breakfast Snob, Nov. 25, 2007:

Funkadelic- Grooveallegiance
Pledge allegiance to the Funk! The equipment fiasco had threatened to derail my groove train, so some serious action was needed...

Osibisa- Move On
OK. This has cowbell, it helps me rock steady... speaking of helping ,Cowbell has posted details on how you can send gifts directly to the troops in Iraq- and a story that might move you to do so.

Larry Graham- Can't Stand The Rain
This morning we had a brief but heavy pelting of hail, which soon turned into a dreary drizzle, which may or may not have cleared up by now...I'm too goddamn gloomy to be bothered to look outside my window-and my window is directly behind my monitor...I'm that depressed.

Kinks- Sleepwalker
This is one of the very first records that I bought with my own money. I wonder if I will ever have my own money again...my unemployment runs out next week, just in time for X-mas...please Godzilla, I'm an adult now- no more retail...no more foodservice...no warehouses...where are the 'real' jobs? The kind you can blog from, I mean.

Soweto Gospel Choir- Paradise Road
Geez, I should stop complaining...it could be worse. I could be in Soweto- or Baghdad.

Stewart Copeland- Gong Rock
Ex-Police drummer's solo album is so good it almost takes my mind off of war and poverty...where is Klark Kent when you need him?

Kraftwerk- Das Model
I start thinking of Africa...and Germans...African Campaign...1941 all over again...Desert Fox...Rat Patrols...make it stop...

Gong-Can You:You Can
I can say that I am truly grateful that I saw Gong perform in Baltimore, Md., many, many years ago...they were great.

Can- Halleluwah
Can't say I saw Can. Fives times fast.

Stewart Copeland- African Dream
According to the computer, I had four on-line listeners...if you add that number to the number of people listening on the FM dial, it's probably closer to a half-dozen than it is to four.

Soweto Gospel Choir - African Dream
You can't spell 'Soweto' without 'Stew', as in Stew Copeland, who we just heard do a different song with the same name as this one. Circular, maaaaan...like a globe, duuuude.

Nina Hagen - African Reggae
Whatever Nina has to say, she says it in German...a Teutonic tantrum invoking Ras Tasfari. That might seem a bit ironic , but it's nothing compared to this:

The new Will Smith movie, I am Legend, is a re-make of a Charlton Heston flick, The Omega Man, based on Richard Matheson's 1950's sci-fi novel, I am Legend.
In The Omega Man, Heston's Lone Gunman killed a lot of vampires...Charlton's character also had interracial consensual necrophilia with an Afro-Vampire, which was pretty hot stuff for a future NRA figurehead to be involved in...I wonder what Heston would say if he found out that the Hollywood Jews gave his job to a black man?
He'd be happy, I think. Chuck marched with MLK and was an ardent civil-rights activist.
Who knew? Let's give some props to Charlton Heston!
It's a madhouse!!!



Joe Strummer- Get Down Moses

Charlton Heston once played Moses in the film version of a different sci-fi book. In the book, the Moses role was originally intended for a non-white man, so I think it's only fair that Smith gets the Omega Man gig...I wonder if Will's romantic interest will be a White Zombie?



Moody Blues- Dear Diary
Woke up late, wasn't were I should have been...what's happening to me?

Rickie Lee Jones- Runaround Rorschach
Ink blot romance. Welcome back.

Blonde Redhead- Four Damaged Lemons
Damaged lemons? Make broken lemonade.

Manfred Mann- Fritz the Blank
On the 'fritz', i.e., broken, damaged- plus a Germanic reference in the names, get it?...oh, never mind. Go back to sleep.

Loreena McKennitt- Gates of Istanbul
I sure wish she'd play somewhere around here. I'd pay if I could.

Quiet Sun-Bargain Classics
Classic early Brian Eno appearance- bought last summer for three bucks: a bargain!

Emerson, Lake & Palmer- When the Apple...
Quite possibly the longest song title ever. I'm not typing it all. I'm not even reading it.
Listen, yes. Type, no.

Soft Machine- As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still
Gong's Daevid Allen briefly played with an early incarnation of Robert Wyatt's Soft Machine...the Soft Machine served as opening act on a Jimi Hendrix tour- one of those concerts was in Richmond. I was too young to attend the Hendrix show, but I saw Allen in Maryland; that's as close to Hendrix as I'm likely to get.

Altan- Beidh Aonach Amarach
I can't pronounce this but I really enjoy it.

Fairport Convention- Now Be Thankful
A belated tip-o-the-hat to Turkey Day.

Jethro Tull- Up To Me
Take you to the cinema, leave you in a wimpy bar, You tell me that we've gone too far, come runnin' up to me...up to me.

It's up to us. 2008 will be a New Year, dammit!

Fiona Joyce- Cry Over You
Who filled your head with this 'freedom' stuff?



Pretty Things- Old Man Going
S.F. Sorrow is one of the first 'concept' albums, ever. It's a musical narration of the sad, lonely and wholly insignificant life of Sebastian Francis Sorrow...first, war fucks him up, then his lover dies in a dirigible explosion which S.F. witnesses...broken, he falls in with a bad lot and eventually an aged and withered Sorrow finds himself sitting on a park bench, sharing fulsome wine with Aqualung.
No one cares.
The End.




------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


TRICK HAPPY ENDING:
In 1998, the Pretty Things re-united and performed the entire S.F. Sorrow album live at London's Abbey Road studios; it was broadcast on the BBC and released as a limited-edition CD that features the entire original band, with Arthur "Fire" Brown as narrator and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour on guitar.


Cool , eh?

Sick and Tagged

I am tagged, nauseous and ashamed.

The tag is from Thivia. I am to list five things that most people don't know about me.

The nausea , I believe, is from the stomach flu or perhaps arising from something that I ate.

The shame is a result of the realization that I haven't yet linked this:

Reconstruction: Why We Blog

Why We Blog is the work of Thivia and many others , and it examines...well, the reasons people blog. Duh.

A number of bloggers were consulted as well. This was my humble offering.

-----------------------------------------
So. The tagging thing.
Five things most people don't know about me:

#1: I am six minutes older than my twin brother.


#2: I once sold a comic story for real money. It was about vampires, a subject that bores me to undeath. It was a long story...here are some pictures.
The title, Destiny Angel, didn't scan very well- in several meanings of the word ...it was a female vampire character created by the publisher, who really wanted to publish a book about female vampires.
His character's background?
She is a female vampire- surely you can come up with one hundred pages based on that, said the publisher.
For a grand? No problem.
The cover title is in red foil print, a common comics-industry 'collector's item' ploy. What it really meant is that a crappy comic that should have cost a buck or two actually cost $4.50 !
In 1996 dollars!

It was awful. Even the fine print sucked. My publisher couldn't spell and was too proud to let me proof-read his copy. "Concent", anyone? Sheesh...



#3: If I am lost, someone will inevitably ask me for directions.



#4: I don't perform routine maintenance on my equipment as often as I should.


#5 : My next-door neighbor is plotting to kill me. She is going to drop a flowerpot on my head as I walk underneath her porch on the way to my car.

1986- Not Such A Great Year

This is the cover of a calendar that my mother's boyfriend, Cal Sorenson, produced in 1985. That is my mother in the middle, Cal is the animal that isn't a horse.
He was a bizarre man and he took a lot of photographs before he vanished in the early Nineties; he's almost certainly dead by drink by now, I am sure.
My mother carried those photos with her for years after Cal left her; in fact, she carried them with her until she died.

I don't know why she did that.

Those photographs, slides and films became mine after Mom died.

Some I destroyed.

Some I kept.

I liked Cal when I met him, he was the only 'Mom BF' that showed any interest in being my friend. He taught me how to fire a rifle, even if it was only a .22...Cal had apparently been a Special Forces sniper operating in Cambodia during the 'Nam war and a biathlon athlete afterwards - I was never sure what to believe, but he could use a 30.06 to put a perfect star pattern on a target so far away I couldn't even see it without a scope. And he could throw knives, kicks and punches with equal precision, so I knew he'd been into something...just not sure what.
Cal also got paid to take pictures of balloons and rodeos , which I thought was a pretty cool way to make money.

But my mother never did have any luck with men, and Cal was no exception.
See this? These are the credits from the back of the calendar:
So what's the problem?
Well.
My mother spelled her name 'Janice' NOT "Janis." Cal, who she was living with, didn't even bother to make sure he spelled her name correctly even though he could not have finished the project without my mother's help and money.
This calendar sold several thousand copies in Park City, which was a much less-traveled destination back then- Peter Fonda bought one. Paul Anka got mom to sign his.
Those of you who remember when the Tonight Show was referred to as 'Carson' might recall bandleader Doc Severinsen's frequent laments about his ex-wife. Doc's ex-wife (see credits above) owned the bookstore that Mom worked at and she (and I) got to meet lots of celebrities as they visited Evonne's store.

To mom, having her picture on the front of a calendar that real-life famous people were buying was a big deal. Mom grew up poor and stayed that way most of her life, but during this brief period she was happy. The famous people liked her for the same reasons everyone else did- she was fun to be around. She was always doing new things, skiing, photography, drawing...trying to learn as much as she could about the world, despite having no real education.

It meant a lot to her that Cal used her as a model and I knew she expected him to propose marriage, he used to hint at it all the time - look at the freekin'pic-but he didn't have any intention of doing that.
He didn't even spell her name correctly.
He was living with her and he couldn't spell her name.
This hurt her a lot- an awful lot- but it took me years to understand that.

Years later, when I had my very first paid comic book story published, the publisher mis-spelled both my first and last names in the credits. I pointed this out to mom and she pulled out one of these old calendars.
Me too, she said.
Mom and I shared a bitter laugh at our own expense.

During this time, I was fairly happy too-I was 18, I had a place of my own and a really sexy girlfriend named Natalie, who just happened to sing and play piano. We were gonna form a band and be famous underground artists- it was inevitable. Fate.
I was nuts about that girl.

One day, when I was visiting Mom, Cal gave me a manila envelope. He asked me to give it to Natalie when I saw her next- sure, no problem.
What's in here?
Photos.
Ooo, cool. Let's look.

What. the. fuck.

That's Natalie on the left.

Tame by today's standards, but I was 18 and had only had two lovers in my life- and one of them was in this picture. I wasn't ready for that.

There were other photos, but I didn't see them all until much, much later.

I asked Cal what the hell was up with the naked graveyard pics of my girlfriend.

"She didn't tell you?"

He claimed that some semi-adult magazine had commissioned him to do some naked vampire shots...well, OK, he really was a pro photographer... but there's another man's penis in a photo with my girlfriend and I didn't much care for that.

So I took the pics to Natalie's...and it was pretty clear she hadn't planned on having me see them. She thought I wouldn't understand and she was right.

"How much did Cal pay you?"

"$100" (a lot back then)

"Did you fuck the naked guy?"

"No, he is gay. It was just pictures, is all."

I should have stopped right there, but I didn't.

"How about Cal? Did you fuck Cal?"

"Uh...."

"You fucked Cal! How cou..."

"Ah, no. I didn't fuck Cal. He asked me fuck myself with a lit candle though."

"....did...you...?"

"Yeah, sure. Why not? A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks..."

My mother's boyfriend was paying my girlfriend to masturbate while he took pictures of her.

I think I started pulling my records out of Natalie's collection and smashing them at this point. I don't remember much after that.

But it was over.

Zombies

"Hi. Remember me?"

I look up from my book and stare into Death's empty eye sockets...no, that's not correct- after a double-take I realize that I'm talking to a zombie- Death is a character in the book I am reading; this zombie is real, I think, although it's rather thin, even by undead standards.

The zombie is waiting for my reply.
Do I remember the zombie?

I've been waiting for this question for many years and I'm suddenly in no hurry to answer it.

"No."

"No?"

Unbelievably, there's what look like tears forming in the zombie's crater eyes. Zombies don't cry, they rot, so I tell myself that it must be pus, not tears, that I see running down it's cheek.

The zombie stammers out the name of a place that I used to go with someone else, someone who didn't leave a trail of maggots behind them as they shambled.

I can lie but my face can't.
I'm betrayed by recognition.
I give up a name.

"You do remember" , says the creature.

There's a lot of hesitation in this statement - there bloody well should be. Years of anger and resentment roll up from some hidden place, feelings I thought were long gone become enormous emotional waves that threaten to dash me against my protective wall of feigned indifference.

"Yes."

I remember. I remember the first morning spent with this creature when it was still alive and I recall thinking how beautiful it was, yet somehow knowing that it was already over.
I remember seeing the flesh vanish, the missing drugs, the missing human...I remember exploring it's body with my tongue and finding the wrong kind of bruises in the wrong places...I remember finding the syringes, stolen from the zombie's diabetic mother.

I remember waiting for my HIV test results from the free clinic- "call next Monday"- and how that was the longest week of my life, which I was certain was going to be much shorter than even I had anticipated.

Yes, I remember the zombie.

" I am sick", the zombie tells me, as if I were blind.

"I am not", I reply , and suddenly the anger is gone and there's nothing left but two zombies.

Zombies don't cry, but this one does.