Sam’s Place

Beautiful People

Sam: ****

• Comments: I have some slight problems w/ the politics of this movie but it’s a good, amusing antiwar movie set in London; released in 1999, set in 1992.

Emma: ****

Goldfish Memory

Sam: ****

• Comments: This is a good movie (4 stars) for anyone who wants to see a light romantic comedy set in Dublin. Otherwise, 3 stars (just OK). It reminds me of the J. Geils Band’s classic song “Love Stinks”:

  you love her
  she loves him
  he loves somebody else
  you just can’t win

Emma: ***

—-

Also, on the Antiwar.com blog, excerpts from The Looming Tower.

Movie rating system:

***** Love
****   Like
***     Eh
**       Dislike
*         Hate

The Long Goodbye

Sam: ****

• I especially liked the ending.

Emma: ***

• I liked the interview w/ Elliott Gould in the Special Features.

Art School Confidential

Emma: **

• Comments: I thought it would be more of comedy, like 40 Year Old Virgin. The lead’s acting was weak.

Sam: ****

• Comments: I thought some of the film’s ridiculing of artsiness was funny, & I enjoyed John Malkovich’s performance.

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Oh yeah, & speaking of Clouds.

Joni Mitchell “Both Sides Now”:

rows and flows of angel hair
and ice cream castles in the air
and feather canyons everywhere
i’ve looked at clouds that way

but now they only block the sun
they rain and snow on everyone
so many things I would have done
but clouds got in my way

i’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
from up and down
and still somehow
it’s cloud illusions I recall
i really don’t know clouds
at all

—-

And on MySpace:

Ramones, Alison Faith Levy, Sippy Cups, Babies

Marianne Faithfull, Lou Reed, Borg9

Diaspora Roundup: Alice Bierhorst, Ben Riseling, Jeff Krebs

Diaspora Roundup: Mommyheads, Jen Clapp, Jeff Palmer

—-

And on Progress Daily:

Fertility Rate & Food Decisions

I pruned back the book list at Progress Daily. The Internet is already too full of stuff.

I finally checked out MySpace, & I found an ex-Sarno: Don, now playing w/ Borg9. And Pat Thomas; he doesn’t have The Sarnos on his resume but he did play drums once or twice for us circa 1990. Jeff Palmer, not an ex-Sarno but an ex-roommate of The Sarnos, & he engineered/produced/played on some of the songs on our unreleased final recording (recorded at John Vanderslice’s). I’m thinking maybe I should be over there.

I read an excellent article about Bob Dylan by Louis Menand, “Bob on Bob“:

… Nothing that Dylan did to get from Hibbing to “Blonde on Blonde” was scandalous, or even eccentric. He happened to come of musical age at a moment when rock and roll was moribund—Frankie Avalon stuff, songs for high-school sock hops. If you were serious, you played folk songs. And to become a folkie, unless you actually were from Oklahoma, you invented a persona. The whole folk revival was make-believe, anyway: it was urban kids trying to sound like hillbillies and sharecroppers. One of the folk-music veterans when Dylan came on the scene was Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a singer with a cowboy twang who had once hoboed around with Guthrie himself. Ramblin’ Jack was the stage name of one Elliot Adnopoz, a Jewish kid from Flatbush whose father was a prominent surgeon. Cambridge was another center of the folk revival—it’s where Baez got her start, in the coffeehouses around Harvard Square. (She was a B.U. dropout.) There was a bluegrass group in that scene, composed mostly of college students, who called themselves the Charles River Valley Boys. Artifice was the price of authenticity. …

He liked Judy Garland singing “The Man That Got Away” and Frank Sinatra singing “Ebb Tide.” He loved “Stardust” and “Moon River.” He didn’t “come out of” any tradition. He was a magpie. The biggest inspiration for his songwriting was a Kurt Weill song, “Pirate Jenny,” from “The Threepenny Opera.” He heard it when he was waiting to meet his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who was working on a production of the play on Christopher Street. (“The Threepenny Opera” was followed by an anthology production called “Brecht on Brecht,” which may have been the inspiration for the title of “Blonde on Blonde.”) …

Elijah Wald (Van Ronk’s co-author), in his indispensable revisionist history of the blues, “Escaping the Delta,” points out that Muddy Waters had more songs in his repertoire by Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, than by any blues musician; that Louis Armstrong’s favorite band was Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians; and that Robert Johnson played Bing Crosby songs. “If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity,” Chuck Berry said, “it would be Nat Cole.” …

Click here for Dylan’s MySpace page. And here’s a poem:

Mr. Dylan
How would you define folk music?
As a constitutional re-play of mass production
Would you call your songs “folk songs”?
No
Are protest songs “folk songs”?
I guess
If they’re a constitutional re-play of mass production
Do you prefer songs with a subtle or obvious message?
With a what?
A subtle or obvious message?
Uh
I don’t really prefer those kinds of songs at all
“Message”
You mean like
What songs with a message?
Well, like “Eve of Destruction” and things like that
Do I prefer that to what?
I don’t know
But your songs are supposed to have a subtle message
Subtle message?
Well, they’re supposed to
Where’d you hear that?

—-

Also, Design

Previous episode here: http://www.samkoritz.com/?p=83

You can see where this is going: both of my acquaintances, my boss & my buddy, who killed themselves apparently had mental suicide soundtracks. Which got me thinking about how easy it is for people to be swayed. Movies, for example, are absurd. We watch them knowing that the actors are pretending, the same plots are rehashed over & over again, yet we pay good money to be emotionally manipulated. (My cousin Nan Goldin wrote that the moment just before a movie starts is when she’s most happy — or something like that.) And music plays an important part in making movies work. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the tv show) quickly moves from comedy to melodrama to horror, & after watching the episodes a 2nd or 3rd time you start to notice how, for example in ”The Zeppo,” the sappy romantic music drops out mid-scene to mock the show’s own overheatedness.

Scientists are divided about why music exists. Some intriguing info from “Sorry, Maestro Barenboim. Music is for idiots and Neanderthals,” by Terence Kealey, The Times:

Geoffrey Miller has examined the gender and age of the singers of 6,000 recent jazz, rock and classical albums, and showed that 90 per cent of commercial songs are produced by males, and that their peak age of production is 30 (the peak age for male success in coition, apparently).

Dr Anne Fernald has shown that babies respond appropriately, with smiles or frowns, to praise or admonishment when delivered in baby talk, even if the language is foreign. “What a good girl!,” delivered in French, provokes a happy smile in an English nursery.

Studies on mothers have shown that, in the privacy of their homes, 100% of mothers sing to their babies.

Jenny Saffron has shown that human babies are born with perfect pitch.

More music science here: http://www.progressdaily.com/?s=music.

And speaking of Buffy & singing, here’s a song from 1 of my favorite episodes, “Once More with Feeling“:

Every single night the same arrangement
I go out and fight the fight
Still, I always feel the strange estrangement
Nothing here is real,
Nothing here is right
I’ve been making shows of trading blows
Just hoping no one knows
That I’ve been

Going through the motions
Walking through the part
Nothing seems to penetrate my heart
I was always brave and kind of righteous
Now I find I’m wavering
Crawl out of your grave you’ll find this fight
Just doesn’t mean a thing

She ain’t got that swing

Thanks for noticing

She does pretty well with fiends from hell
But lately, we can tell
That she’s just

Going through the motions
Faking it somehow
She’s not even half the girl she…
Ow!

Will I stay this way forever?
Sleepwalk through my life’s endeavor

How can I repay?

Whatever
I don’t want to be

Going through the motions
Losing all my drive
I can’t even see
If this is really me
And I just wanna be
Alive

—-

Also, Intangible Assets http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/10/08/intangible-assets/

Previous episode here.

As I was saying, I was listening to some loud music a while back & it reminded me of a time in the early- or mid-90s when I was working at a “record store.” One evening after we closed the owner blasted Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.” He usually didn’t play music in the store, & at no other time that I know of did he play music at a deafening volume. He shortly thereafter killed himself but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I made the connection, somehow.

A few years later, an acquaintance of mine gave me a tape of songs by his band. For no apparent reason he ended the tape w/ a recording by Ozzy Osbourne, “Goodbye to Romance” — video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PibEhjo54XM. Lyrics here:

Yesterday has been and gone
Tomorrow will I find the sun
Or will it rain
Everybody’s having fun
Except me, I’m the lonely one
I live in shame

I’ve been the king, I’ve been the clown
Now broken wings can’t hold me down
I’m free again
The jester with the broken crown
It won’t be me this time around
To love in vain

And I feel the time is right
Although I know that you just might say to me
What’cha gonna do
But I have to take this chance goodbye
To friends and to romance
And to all of you
Come on now

And the weather’s looking fine
And I think the sun will shine again
And I feel I’ve cleared my mind
All the past is left behind again

I say goodbye to romance, yeah
Goodbye to friends, I tell you
Goodbye to all the past
I guess that we’ll meet
We’ll meet in the end

(To be continued.)

—-

Plus, Women, Education & Income & Information & Decision-Making

And a new Backtalk

I’ve been reading some fiction, which is fairly unusual for me. I just finished Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother. JR recommended Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, about an autistic savant, & I really enjoyed that so I gave ASoB a try. I liked Curious Incident better; unlike ASoB it had a single narrative perspective & a mystery to drive the plot. ASoB had its moments, though, & without spoiling the plot too much I can say that it’s a celebration of love, marriage, family (even dysfunctional family), & community. (It would make a good movie.) That might seem conservative but one of the couples portrayed is gay & the only religious characters are unflatteringly portrayed. 

Haddon has a great website — http://www.markhaddon.com – divided into two sections, Art & Life. Which reminds me of a song that proves that not everything can be googled. I think it’s called “Art & Life,” from defunct SF band The Furies’ album Fun Around the World. The lyrics are not Google-able. Something like:

What’s the difference between art & life?
One’s full of struggle & one’s full of strife.

Art has life; they call it passion.
Life has art; they call it fashion.

Sometimes it’s really hard to tell them apart
Because there is no difference between life & art.

Let’s bury Andy Warhol & get on with it.

Previous episode here.

Boys Life was not the only Boston band whose singer affected an English-ish accent.  That was one of the new music memes at the time. (Gang of Four-influenced) The Proletariat, for example, managed to be a respected punk band despite their Anglo-inflected singer & propagandistic lyrics. I liked their song “Options” but thought it was unintentionally funny:

Bend my ear
Twist my arm
Tell me the options
Tell me the options
Military service
Factory employment
Welfare assistance
Tell me the options

Turns out (see Prole link above) that the band members dropped out of college & worked blue collar jobs.

(To be continued.)

—–

Also, More Monkeynomics

Power of Music I, II, & III 

I thought of someone else from Malden, the band Boys Life. They were a good band that made surprisingly sophisticated music, considering their home town. I thought Malden was somewhat better than Everett, which was somewhat better than Chelsea. Michelle Tea writes about moving to Everett from Chelsea briefly & feeling like she’d moved to a better place. But an early punk rock fan friend of mine from Everett transferred to a private school in Malden & got beat up & stuffed into & locked in a locker (I seem to remember that he toned down his punkness thereafter). Not much of that treatment in Everett; though I remember an old man in Brigham’s Ice Cream yelling at DD: “Why don’t you get the hell out of this country.”

Boys Life’s singer sang in a sorta British accent, bizarrely. Kinda like Psych Furs. Their lyricist/manager wrote a book of poems called Malden. Here’s one (I can relate to) called “The Savior,” about Bobby Orr & Phil Esposito:

Streets reserved seven days a week
for endless games of street hockey
tennis courts and school yards
filled with stick wielding boys
all pretending to be Bobby
Ice rinks popping up in town after town
to accommodate
all these Bobbys:
Working class kids.
Working class Bobbys.
Irish and Italian kids.
Irish and Italian Bobbys.
all Bobbys.
all
except me:
I pretended to be Phil.

I just now found out that Boys Life’s sax player later played in Black Cat Bone — a sorta goth/blues band I liked. I knew 1 or 2 of their members, because they lived & practiced near our Thayer St loft. (1 of their songs is on this comp CD.) Small world.

—-

Also, The Wisdom of Independent Guessing

I was listening to Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love Babe,” playing the little CD player louder than usual, & thinking how good that song sounded. & it reminded me of another time I listened to abnormally loud music. It was sometime in the early- or mid-90s. I worked at a record store (that’s what we still called them then), & one night after we closed the owner blasted Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.” [To be continued. But first, some lyrics:]

I’ve heard people say that
Too much of anything is not good for you, baby
Oh no
But I don’t know about that
There’s many times that we’ve loved
We’ve shared love and made love
It doesn’t seem to me like it’s enough
There’s just not enough of it
There’s just not enough
Oh oh, babe

My darling, I can’t get enough of your love babe
Girl, I don’t know, I don’t know why
Can’t get enough of your love babe
Oh, some things I can’t get used to
No matter how I try
Just like the more you give, the more I want
And baby, that’s no lie
Oh no, babe

Tell me, what can I say?
What am I gonna do?
How should I feel when everything is you?
What kind of love is this that you’re givin’ me?
Is it in your kiss or just because you’re sweet?

Girl, all I know is every time you’re here
I feel the change
Somethin’ moves
I scream your name
Do whatcha got to do

Darling, I can’t get enough of your love babe
Girl, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know why
I can’t get enough of your love babe
Oh no, babe

Girl, if I could only make you see
And make you understand
Girl, your love for me is all I need
And more than I can stand
Oh well, babe

How can I explain all the things I feel?
You’ve given me so much
Girl, you’re so unreal
Still I keep loving you
More and more each time
Girl, what am I gonna do
Because you blow my mind

Baby, let me take all of my life to find you
But you can believe it’s gonna take
the rest of my life to keep you

Oh no, babe
My darling, I can’t get enough of your love babe
Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know why
Can’t get enough of your love babe
Oh my darling, I can’t get enough of your love babe
Oh babe
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know why
I can’t get enough of your love babe
Oh babe

And:

When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that’s the best
When I lay me down to die
Goin’ up to the spirit in the sky
That’s where I’m gonna go when I die
When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that’s the best

Prepare yourself you know it’s a must
Gotta have a friend in Jesus
So you know that when you die
He’s gonna recommend you
To the spirit in the sky
Gonna recommend you
That’s where you’re gonna go when you die
When you die and they lay you to rest
You’re gonna go to the place that’s the best

Never been a sinner I never sinned
I got a friend in Jesus
So you know that when I die
He’s gonna set me up with
The spirit in the sky
Oh set me up with the spirit in the sky
That’s where I’m gonna go when I die
When I die and they lay me to rest
I’m gonna go to the place that’s the best
Go to the place that’s the best

So Peebo & I went to see a free movie preview, Zen Noir. Zen could mean just-so Taoism crossed w/ riddle-me-this, & noir can be good, & mashups are trendy, & free is good, & the movie won awards, so odds were good that it would be worthwhile. But high expectations can be deadly to movie-going fun (see “Just Like Heaven” below for the opposite phenomenon). And it doesn’t help when a wide-shouldered LotR-type troll in dirty pants sits next to one (me), & shoulders over the armrest, or when a white-haired, Michael Jackson plastic jacket-wearing lech creepily tries to hit on one (Peebo) — a sortof movie audience nightmare sandwich. A friend of mine said that this is why she’s all but stopped going to the movies.

And the movie was terrible as art and even worse since it was religious sect/ philosophical propaganda.

Something Zen I liked was Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality. Warner was a punk rock bassist & later a neo-psych recording artist, & then a living-in-Japan Zen priest. It’s been a while since I read the book, but I remember not liking the 1st chapter, then liking the rest of it, so give it a chance.

Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center tells the story of abuse of power at SFZC. Roshi Richard Baker’s shenanigans (see “Richard Baker and the Myth of the Zen Roshi“) are pretty well-known but his successor Reb Anderson had his own experiment in wackiness, being caught waving a gun that he claimed to have found near corpse in Golden Gate Park. He’d taken the gun from the crime-scene, never reported the corpse, & carried the gun around with him for years. The police eventually “lost” their records regarding the politically-connected sect’s leader’s gun-brandishing.

Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki is a biography of the guy who founded the SFZC (and wrote the influential Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind). The author, David Chadwick, was a follower and admirer of Suzuki, but he’s honest enought in his portrayal that the reader may not share Chadwick’s admiration. And you can see how America changed a Japanese Zen master’s import.

Zen at War ties up the whole Zen feet-of-clay reading list.

“Pigs in Zen” by Jane’s Addiction:

Pig’s in the mud
When he tires
Pig’s in zen
Pig’s in zen
Pig is nude
Unashamed
Pig’s in zen
Pig’s in zen

Talking bout the pig
The pig
The pig – uh
Pa-pa-pa-pa-pig
Goddamned pig …

The pig is led to the slaughter
Pig is led to the slaughter
This he says
Is the price some pay
For a simple life
How he feels
Thats proof for him
Pig’s in zen

Talkin bout the pig
The pig
The pig
The pig
The pig
The pig
Goddamned pig
The pig – uh
Pa-pa-pa-pa-pig

—

And on ProgressDaily we have “Porkers United.”