Here's Arthur Lee in one of his last performances, playing with backup band Baby Lemonade, whom I saw at the L.A. Arthur Lee benefit which he was too sick to attend. Lee died in August.
We should all endeavor to begin songs with "Yeah".
"Richard Scarry's Best First Book Ever", along with The Necronomicon and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a favorite of ACI's and is her preferred afternoon reading.
It provides a snapshot of the Cat family and their life in Busytown.
That Cat family has an extended member, Lowly Worm, who apears to have been dumped on them by his absentee parents. Lowly sleeps over and accompanies the family on all its errands. He has chores and seems to have insinuated himself pretty well into the family's life. In addition, it appears that Lowly has a crush on young Sally Cat, giving her a Valentine's Day card.
I don't trust him. He wears a hat with a feather in it, like a pimp.
But all Busytown is dysfunctional. That a pig is the town butcher, presiding over choice cuts of his relatives, is not nearly as weird as the fact that billboards and even postage stamps carry images of the Cat family and Lowly. In such a self-referential and narcissistic place, is it any wonder that its citizens literally sell and eat themselves?
Throughout the book runs Mr. Frumble, always chasing his hat. He, too, is a Pig. In the pursuit of his hat, Mr. Frumble shows up at the Cats' kitchen window, at the schoolhouse, and everywhere they go. He is like Bob Ewell but there is no Boo Radley to counter him. Mr. Frumble will eventually use his hat to mask a quintuple homicide.
The twin Goofuses to the Cat family's (and Lowly's) Gallant are Bop and Bonk Pig, scions of the Pig agro-fortune. Bop and Bonk fight, steal, interrupt their mother, and cause a mess.
As Lowly leaves his lunch with them, he turns and says, "Good luck with your manners lessons!"
One should never attack someone's parenting skills unless one is a TV personality.
TAARG said: "Lowly sure knows how to stick the knife in."
Maybe that's why his parents abandoned him.
Here is an excellent biography of Richard Scarry, but look at the rest of the site at your own risk.
Here is a very insightful comparison between two versions of the same Richard Scarry book, politically corrected after twenty years.
In anticipation of not watching the new movie version, I re-read Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" recently, and realized I'd neglected the living shit out of it in college. What was wrong with me?
The book is less about the Huey Long-esque Willie Stark than it is about the disaffectedness of the real protagonist, Jack Burden. And this is real proto-noir disaffection, not the cry for help disaffection of books like "The Catcher in the Rye".
For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal's own hand and every man is a suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.
and
I had dug up the truth and the truth always kills the father, the good and weak one or the strong and bad one, and you are left alone with yourself and the truth, and can never ask Dad, who didn't know anyway and who is deader than mackerel.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and has never gone out of print. The first movie adaptation won several Academy Awards.
I think we're going to Netflix the first movie version. Broderick Crawford looks more like my mental picture of Willie Stark than Sean Penn does, and the hubris involved in casting Anthony Hopkins as a genteel southern Judge without requiring him to change his Welsh accent makes me feel all disaffected.
...neither are killer whales. I have it on good authority that ducks, elves, and the color turquoise are also bastards.
Zhang Xinyan, the Chinese migrant worker whose affection was violently spurned by Gu Gu, a six-year-old panda residing at the Beijing Zoo, should have known better.
"Pandas have been jerks since the time of the ancient astronauts," said Dr. A.J. Ferntlnr, professor of Panda Studies at McGill University. "One put the moves on my wife at a faculty party."
Xinyan, drunk on three pitchers of beer, later kicked Gu Gu, who had bitten his leg.
"Oh, he should have totally kicked that panda," Ferntlnr remarked. "I would have also punched him in his snout, beak, whatever."
Sunset Blvd.'s Sunset Beach (formerly Dublin's) has a little area that has a very Clockwork Orange feel to it.
I used to go to Dublin's for St. Patrick's Day and for bachelor parties, the last of which involved my friend Chris vomiting up one side of the building and down the other. He repeated the trick on his limousine. He's married to someone else now.
Anyway, the owner of the club told me that there is about 30 percent of Dublin's left in the new structure, which now looks part art gallery/part ferry terminal. He said it took two years to knock Dublin's down and build Sunset Beach.
They don't sell Jagermeister but they're thinking about it.
My older brother John, who got me into the Beatles and probably influenced my flirtation with technology, died last week. He was 45.
He died unexpectedly and suddenly of an aortic aneurysm. Prior to this, things were looking up in his life. Hopeful times are the best times, and we are comforted by the fact that he was aware things were on the upswing.
My family reconverged on Massachusetts after a series of family reunions last month.
Many of my siblings, including myself, had not seen John in several years. We got together and worked, ate, drank, talked, sat, stood, sat, stood, knelt, sat, stood, knelt (it was a Catholic ceremony), and joked about it over a few days.
St. John the Evangelist Church in North Chelmsford is right across the street, and I mean directly across the street, from Dolan's Funeral Home. Yet a motorcade of hearses and like-hearses proceeded from the parking lot of Dolan's across the street to the church after the viewing.
Funeral vehicles, as you can see from the picture, are getting fancier.
Once we got to the parking lot of the church we started circling around it. It would have taken a lot less time to walk across the street. Suddenly I felt like I was back in Los Angeles paying someone to valet my car 20 feet away from where I stood.
My brother Andy leaned over to the limo driver and asked, "You going the long way?"
The limo driver goes, "Yeah, but the fare's the same."
My sister Anne was delivering one of the readings, and it was the Revelation (aka The Apocalypse of John) verse that begins with "Now I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things..." After she returned to her seat, I said, "Nice that you worked John into that," and she said, "Yeah, it originally said 'Luke'."
Like the birthday card passed around the office, John's employer sent around a condolence card. It was interesting to read the comments, some of which reflected the awkwardness of not really knowing the person one is being asked to write about.
His boss wrote: "John was one of the most professional employees I have seen in a while" and signed it "John's supervisor" and another employee wrote, "Heaven must have been short an angel".
I'd like to think that John would have had a laugh about these things.
John did not like crowds, yet one showed up for his service. My sister Mary noted this in the eulogy. "I think he might be exasperated," she said.
Altogether this was a sad time, punctuated with the humor characteristic of an Irish funeral.
What have I learned in the decade since Tupac's death?
Today marks the beginning of the second decade following the murder of Tupac Shakur. As a rapper and street activist, I am sensitive to the power of this time in history, and I've spent some time thinking about what I've learned since the night 'Pac got popped.
1. Sometimes it pays to wait for last minute airline deals. 2. Sour cream is the hidden ingredient in many of my favorite dishes. 3. Always document phone conversations with service providers as well as keep logs of professional conversations. 4. Some medications require more time to reach maintenance levels. 5. "Lesbian" is often relative. 6. Drink lots of water. 7. Breathing through the nose, or vegetative breathing, is healthier than mouth breathing. 8. It's "pixillated", not "pixelated", despite what seems obvious. 9. People would eat hot dogs who would not eat veal. 10. People who seemed fat in the 70's weren't, usually.
There are probably other things I've learned, but a thug don't contemplate; he activate.
I visited the Lyndon B. Johnson Library a couple of times this week.
The library is on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, and one day I couldn't park because there was a Longhorns game. Every student at UT wears a UT t-shirt; I have never seen anything like that. It is a combination of school pride and perhaps the ability of orange to conceal sweat rings (it's very hot there - I'm not saying people in Austin are unhygienic).
THE LBJ library is one of two presidential libraries on college campuses. The other belongs to Bush the First up north at Texas A&M College Station. Bush the Younger, says word on the street, will probably have his library at Southern Methodist University, though I think a nice Presidential Library concession at Arlington Stadium where the Rangers play or perhaps a floor of some oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico might be appropriate. The first exhibit could be called something like Let's Foget this All Happened.
The staff of the Johnson Library, some of whom are feds and some of whom are University employees, were all very helpful. On site are LBJ's Lincoln limo, a scale model of his Oval Office, breakdowns of the thousand or so pieces of Great Society legislation, and an animatronic joke-telling LBJ robot.
The three people I asked were unaware of this recording of LBJ asking to get more room in the crotch.
One day I'll have an animatronic version of myself, and then you'll be sorry.
Judging from audience reaction (or maybe they were just being kind), the show went very well. Austin has embraced me, but to what end? It's still difficult for me to find parking downtown.
I started with a slide show detailing My Austin, and then did a Lovecraftian poetry slam and a 40's radio version of someone's day. It was fun.
A very nice crowd filled the theatre and I hung out with members of other improv troupes from around the country until 6 in the morning, talking about how people justify not having day jobs. Crazy 30-year-olds.
On her second birthday, we finally permitted ACI to watch television (specifically: The Teletubbies).
"Richard Scarry's Best First Book Ever", along with The Necronomicon and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a favorite of ACI's and is her preferred afternoon reading.
In anticipation of not watching the new movie version, I re-read Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" recently, and realized I'd neglected the living shit out of it in college. What was wrong with me?
This guy was in front of me at the In 'n' Out Burger in Van Nuys.
...neither are killer whales. I have it on good authority that ducks, elves, and the color turquoise are also bastards.
My older brother John, who got me into the Beatles and probably influenced my flirtation with technology, died last week. He was 45.
Malibu:
Only the presence of undead, gold-craving, shipwrecked lepers allowed the Pacific to make the finals.
...begins one of my favorite limericks ever.
Today marks the beginning of the second decade following the murder of Tupac Shakur. As a rapper and street activist, I am sensitive to the power of this time in history, and I've spent some time thinking about what I've learned since the night 'Pac got popped.
Judging from audience reaction (or maybe they were just being kind), the show went very well. Austin has embraced me, but to what end? It's still difficult for me to find parking downtown.
