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.




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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?

In Defense Of Blog (#96 in a series of 2)

It seems that hardly a day goes by without another lurid internet scandal hitting the news. This hoax led to the suicide of a young girl- it is especially heinous because it was perpetrated by adults, not by other kids. It was done by neighbors.
One cannot help but conclude that the adults- who passed themselves off as a teenage boy- enjoyed the cruel emotional destruction that they wrought on the poor girl- there doesn't seem to be any motive other than pure evil meanness and sadism.

Cable news has created a new "reality" genre- one in which the lowest life-forms on the planet (Internet Trolls) are lured into fake trysts with underage decoys that they met in chat rooms; when they arrive at the meeting place, they are met with TV news crews and , later, the police. Strangely, many of the men (it's always men) have seen these programs, yet they can't resist the trap...and there seem to be an endless supply of these 'predators'. It's disturbing, to say the least.

All of this negative attention makes me increasingly reluctant to discuss blogging with my non-blogger pals, so I'd like to take a minute and point out a few of the positive things that blogging has brought into my life:

Yesterday I had something that I wanted to discuss with somebody- but most of my local friends know each other and this town has an amazing ability to distort gossip- so I called a long-distance blogpal and had a long talk about football, sex, politics, religion and stuff...it dawned on me that I was watching NFL football while talking on the phone with a woman about sex (and football!)- for free! A lot of men would pay for that...

...speaking of paid, I made honest money last week, and I couldn't have done it without my blog. A while back, I got a comment or two from a fellow music fan who had found my blog by googling obscure bands... we exchanged a email or three and it turned out that we live in the same city, so he came down and sat in with me one morning during my show- we found that we live exactly one block apart, small world, eh?
Last week I fed his cats for him while he moshed across England- upon his return I was rewarded with cash, a tin of travel sweets from London and assorted music-related geegaws not typically found in the US.

Honestly, I'd rather clean catshit than work for lawyers again, but I do need to find a real job soon...

Blog also helped me through the long painful months after I got sick and had to quit drinking. I quit cold turkey without any outside help, which is probably the hardest possible way- I started writing about my experiences on my blog and I soon found that I wasn't alone, which helped a lot during the worst of days.
I got hurt a few times too, but that's part of life, ya know? Stronger for it and all that...yeah.

I've been blogging nearly four years, which is a long time by blog standards. There's a big world out there that doesn't involve blogging, and I've had a slow, difficult time adjusting to it since I quit drinking- that sort of change just doesn't happen overnight- things have been really rough lately but I haven't started drinking again, so I feel like some real progress has been made...but I've also started slacking on my blog as I get more involved with real life; it's as if blog is a sort of therapy for me ( I know I'm not alone in this) and maybe, just maybe I don't need therapy as badly as I once did.
At least I hope that there is some truth in that.

Anyway, this isn't the end, not yet...I've come close to deleting this blog many,many times... something always keeps me from doing so. I've had at least a half-dozen other blogs over the last few years and never formed any sort of attachment to or from them, but this one has survived every purge, weathered every storm...and there's an election year coming up, so I imagine my political outrage will keep me on-line to some degree, but things are changing for me. There are things happening I don't feel like blogging about- perhaps they'll be fodder for future posts, perhaps not...

I've been becoming more interested in writing fiction, but I find that blog is a terrible platform for long, serialized fiction- the chapters are presented to the reader in reverse order- and the reader, unless they are well-versed in the logistics of blog, often doesn't realize this, entering in the middle or at the end...one of the first blogs I read was like that.
It wasn't until the author printed out the entire blog in manuscript form and mailed it to me that I caught on- it was excellent...that seems so long ago , but it's the sort of thing that keeps me coming back to blogworld- one of the finest unpublished writers I've ever read once sent me an entire manuscript- that never woulda happened without my own blog.
Strange things can happen- sometimes that includes good things.

Hmm...it occurs to me that I am giving myself a pep talk- and that means :

Puppies!

See ya soon.

A Cautionary Toy

My formative years were fraught with disappointment, stupidity, guilt, brutality and Sea Monkeys.
I'm not kidding. I can't even look at this ad without feeling like I'm dredging up a mucky mnemonic boot brimming with bitterness and remorse.


I put a lot of work into getting ripped off on the monkey scam. A lot of planets had to align just so to allow me to order the monkeys - as children we rarely stayed in one place for the requisite 6-8 weeks required for postal delivery; having a fixed mailing address meant that things at home were relatively stable- which was unusual, to say the least.
To my dad's credit, he was around during this episode.
He gave me a dollar and tried to warn me about the Sea Monkeys, but I wouldn't listen.

"Are you sure that this is what you want to buy? You only have one dollar to spend. That's a lot of money. "

He knew the Sea Monkeys were a scam. It was one of the very few things he and mom agreed on. She echoed dad's words.

"Are you sure? You'll have to take care of them.They might not be what you think."

"Of course I'm sure I want the Sea Monkeys! I'm five fucking years old! I'll believe anything if I think it'll provide even a passing diversion from the despair that your divorce is causing me."

Well, I didn't exactly say that. More likely I just pouted. But I did get permission to send away for the Monkeys.

*SPOILER WARNING*

I think most of us know the truth behind Sea Monkeys by now. They are Artemia Salina , i.e., brine shrimp. They don't look anything like the cavorting pink cuties in the advert.
This is what they look like. For scale, imagine the object below is roughly the same size as a deodorant stick:


If I had any common sense I'd have known that the fanciful critters in the comic ad were bullshit, but hey, I was five.

The Sea Monkeys were not as advertised, but they were worth the dollar for the lessons I learned from them:

1) Always read the fine print.
2) Be careful what you wish for.
3) A fool and his money are soon parted.

All standard rite of passage stuff, not exactly good times, but valuable life lessons nonetheless. Surely there can't be any long-term emotional damage resulting from the Sea Monkeys, could there? Everybody goes through a Sea Monkey moment- get over it, eh?

Ah, should that it be so easy. See, those little shrimp did hatch. Inside 24 hours I had a goldfish bowl brimming with tiny aquatic roaches. They weren't much to look at and they didn't do squat by way of tricks.
My mother's aquarium was much more fun to watch. There was a little pink castle in the aquarium , just like the one in the advertisement above. Coincidently, my mom loved angelfish, one of which also appears in the comic clipping.

My mom had already nixed my idea to raise my monkeys in her aquarium. She didn't tell me why- she just said "it wouldn't be good for them." I didn't know what she meant but I obeyed her. The monkeys stayed in the fishbowl. As pets go, they were a crashing bore.

It wasn't long before I had a plan. I thought my monkeys might benefit from some company. Perhaps a new playmate might inspire them to get bigger and more interesting...I stood on a chair and used mom's little green net to scoop an angelfish out of the aquarium and drop it --ploop!--into my tiny Sea Monkey world. Such friends they'd be!

I waited breathlessly for the monkeys to cheerfully greet their bowl-mate. They didn't do that.

I didn't expect what happened next, but it did cure my boredom.

If you drop an angelfish into a bowl of Sea Monkeys , the fish will eat until all the monkeys are gone or the fish dies, whichever occurs first. In this case, it was both. The poor angelfish, which was as bloated as it's puffer cousin, wasn't swimming correctly. It wasn't swimming at all.

Oh shit. I'd better put it back in the aquarium and hope mom doesn't notice.

She noticed.

"Did you put those little fuckers in my tank?", she asked.

"No."

"Then why is my fish leaking Sea Monkeys?"

I had become a killer.

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NEXT: Yogurt and cultured genocide.