Back in Prague after a long, rainy, fun-filled weekend in my favorite city.
Some visual impressions from the trip:
Cute.
Alien.
Meticulous.
Silly.
Cool.
Disturbing, at best.
Austere.
Eerily lifelike.
Ahmadinejad?
Pensive.
Back to silly.
Only regret is that I didn’t have time to make it to Taqueria Dolores.
My friend Patrick once stopped at a Lego store in Hamburg where they sell Lego parts in separate vats. He noticed that there was one vat filled with turbans, another full of mustachioed scowls and a third filled with dynamite-strapped torsos. Voila, the Lego Terrorist was born:
He’s small, but his heart is filled with murderous schemes.
I was first introduced to the Lego Terrorist on a flight Patrick and I took to Portugal (the same vacation, incidentally, that I referenced in the Chestbump post). Here’s the LT evading airport security, boarding our flight and triumphantly guffawing on a seat-back tray.
While on this trip, we happened to duck into an antique toy museum in Sintra just to get out of the rain. Realizing we had the LT along with us, we tried to engage the museum guide person in a discussion of his merits, hoping perhaps that the museum would seize the opportunity to enshrine him. Instead, the woman basically made it clear that she didn’t get it and would like it if we stopped talking to her. I thought this was somewhat prissy and oblique, given that the museum had totally strange installations involving, for example, figurines of Hitler and Moussilini:
At some point, Patrick thought he should tell the Lego people about his creation, so he mailed them a letter along with a sample Terrorist. In this telling, the letter had barely fallen into the post box when his phone rang with a highly concerned Lego representative on the other end. The representative felt impelled to apologize (?), announced that the component parts of the LT had been put out of service and asked a few nervous questions to gauge my friend’s level of interest in publicizing his discovery. Positively reassured, he hung up and mailed my friend complimentary tickets to Lego Land.
You have to figure that somehow nobody at Lego had stopped to rethink the political implications of the Lego selection for a decade or so until this incident happened.
Today’s featured mixed-ethnicity jazzercise couple:
Disco producer Bob Blank and his wife, one-time James Brown foil Lola Blank.
I’m not sure what to make of Bob Blank. On the one hand, he worked with the great Arthur Russell. Generally, this would be enough in my mind to immunize him against criticism for anything (yes, even for posing in the above photo). On the other hand, he also had the nerve to say semi-mean things about Arthur Russell in the Arthur Russell bio-pic Wild Combination (where I got the image from). Judas! Purple Jazzercise Judas!
Moreover, he produced ‘I Got My Mind Made Up‘, the first minute of which is one of the great defining minutes of disco ever recorded. On the other hand, the rest of ‘Mind Made Up’ is pretty lame. So, yeah: mixed verdict.
In last weekend’s Barf/Sick post, I mentioned our intrepid traveller friend Jim who stayed with us for a few days on the way back through various Eastern European and Asian countries. I neglected to write that he was joined by his girlfriend, the able Karen, who is also a veteran traveller in her own right and recently spent a solid block of time teaching English in Libya.
Karen described to us a flight on Libyan Airlines where passengers were treated to a Hollywood film in which an exposed chunk of female arm flesh was deemed unchaste and digitally blurred out by the local censors. Now, it seems to me that trying to digitally censor an arm is likely only to produce a similar, slightly larger skin-colored shape that’s even more comely, smooth, and unblemished in appearance. But, hey, who am I to judge. Whatever blows your holy beard back…
Karen’s accounts of Libya happily reminded me of my dictator-crush on Muammar Qaddafi, easily my favorite contemporary tyrant. Some Qaddafi fun facts:
1. Despite presiding over a strict Muslim society, Qaddafi has a personal phalanx of hot female gun-toting body guards.
2. Despite presiding over a strict Muslim society, Qaddafi is reportedly gayer than a french horn actually, this doesn’t seem to stand up— never mind.
3. A profile in the New Yorker from a few years back passes on this local parable:
Three contestants are in a race to run five hundred meters carrying a bag of rats. The first sets off at a good pace, but after a hundred meters the rats have chewed through the bag and spill onto the course. The second contestant gets to a hundred and fifty meters, and the same thing happens. The third contestant shakes the bag so vigorously as he runs that the rats are constantly tumbling and cannot chew on the anything and he takes the prize. That third contestant is Libya’s leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.
4. A New York Times Magazine article from 2003 describes Qaddafi’s social magnetism thusly:
In photographs taken of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, his aides appear pale and frozen-smiled, a collection of dead-men-walking awaiting the next purge. Among those around Qaddafi, by contrast, there was an excited air that veered toward the giddy, as if they were in the presence of some A-list celebrity and still couldn’t quite believe their good luck.
5. His recent and much-reported speech to the United Nations, that went on for so long that his translator reportedly shrieked, ‘I can’t take it any longer!’ and collapsed before being replaced by another emergency back-up. (Note: the speech lasted 90 minutes, which is well beyond the 15 minute time-limit that is politely agreed upon in UN circles. However, it was far from the longest speech in UN history, trailing Castro’s 4.5 hour rant in 1960 and some Indian MP’s 8 hour lecture on relations with Kashmir.)
To be fair, one has to mention Qaddafi not-so-fun facts, which include: (1) terrorism; (2) massive curtailment of civil liberties and corruption; (3) wrongful imprisonment of Bulgarian nurses.
Red Sox fold like accordions, meekly bow out of playoffs. No more meaningful baseball for another 7 months.
My feelings exactly.
Or so it would seem…
We took our kid Felix to the doctor today for a checkup and were told that he’s the size of an 8 month old. Even though he’s only 4 months. Uh oh. During an earlier visit, one mother even thought there was something developmentally awry because he wasn’t doing the stuff that 8 month old kids do, but rather lying on his back and cooing in his happy 4 month old’s fashion.
We celebrated the news by buying him a winter hat that’s supposed to be for a 2-3 year old (fits perfectly… uh oh) and makes him look like a Mongol. Hopefully, the combination of his towering stature and fearsome hat will scare the daylights out of other kids.
It’s always entertaining when friends blow through Prague on the way home from travels to more easterly countries. Our buddy Jim stayed with us a few days this week on a journey that began in Japan and curled through China, Russia and Ukraine. Somewhere along the way, he picked up a souvenir box of Barf dishwashing detergent:
Honey, I cleaned it with Barf!
I don’t remember where exactly he picked this up, but I like to imagine that it was produced at this curious Sick headquarters building that I recently spotted in Prague for the first time. It’s situated somewhere in Vrsovice– I noticed it while looking south from Havlickovy sady.
Sick: makers of fine products including Barf
Now that Rhino Records has released the glorious Big Star box set Keep An Eye On The Sky, it seems like a good time to revisit the topic of William Eggleston and Big Star that I blogged on a few months ago…
The first time I wandered into a retrospective of Eggleston photos, I thought, ‘Jesus, this guy’s photos remind me so much of Big Star’s music, I can’t get over it’… and this was a few minutes before I ran into the Red Ceiling image that Big Star used for the cover of their seminal Radio City album. The point being, I can’t think of another example of pop music sounding so much like a visual artist, or of photographs looking so much like a band’s songs…. and judging from the Radio City cover, the band agreed. Well, one thing I learned from the Pitchfork review of the box set is that the kinship between the two ran deeper than I’d known: the reviewer mentions that Eggleston is actually playing piano on one of the tracks off the third album, ‘Nature Boy’ (not a great or important Big Star song, to be sure… but still).
Reading about Eggleston’s piano cameo reinvigorated my curiosity about the connection between these two, and I spent a few minutes looking through Eggleston photos on Flickr and trying to match them to Big Star songs in terms of mood and subject matter. Obviously a pretty dorky and subjective exercise, but fun nevertheless. This one, for example, make me think right away of the song ‘Thirteen“:
A few other things about Keep An Eye On The Sky:
1. It sounds great to me, and all my audiophile friends who are really into remasters and whatnot give it the stamp of approval. The acoustic songs, in particular, seems to benefit from the remastering treatment, as songs like “Thirteen” no longer have this muffled quality that previously allowed the considerable sentimentality of the song to outshine the prettiness of it. Now, it just sounds so damn good that who cares if he’s crooning wondering “would you be an outlaw for my love?” Also, the alternate versions of songs are honestly often really different and revelatory and good, all of which is pretty unusual.
2. There’s the interesting matter of the third album, Sister Lovers, having a different song order than we’re used to from the previous official version. The little vaudevillian, clowny opening to ‘Jesus Christ’ starts the album, but this time it’s stretched out into a whole song of it’s own. Then, ‘Friends’ and the great ‘Femme Fatale’ cover follow before the rocker ‘Kizza Me’ which is the opening track on the old version. Now, I’ve always been a more of a Sister Lovers guy than a #1 Record or Radio City fan– it’s really one of my favorite albums and has a whole dimension of smacked-out introspection that I think the other two records lack somewhat (to me, the other two have always sounded like studio transcriptions of a live set, faithful and brilliant recreations but somehow soulless compared to Sister Lovers), so this reshuffling of the song order is all pretty interesting to me. I couldn’t find any explanation for this in reviews, but I like to think that the order on the box set is the ‘real’ song order that the band intended. ‘Kizza Me’ is a good song, but it has elements of the obligatory knee-jerk rocker, the kind of song that a record label wants to have the album start with, and seems like filler before ‘Friends’, ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘Femme Fatale’- the real marrow or the album- come marching in. Then again, both the record label and the band mates were reportedly in total tatters (suffering from bankruptcy and heavy drug abuse, respectively) by the time the album was finished, so who really knows who intended what or when.
3. The Pitchfork reviewer makes a few disgusted remarks about past attempts to anthologize the band which have resulted in some pretty badly-assembled best hits albums. Nothing, however, could beat the decision made back in the early CD days to combine the band’s first two albums into one album but leave off ‘On the Street’ in order to fit them into one CD. ‘On the Street’ was only so catchy and rocking that That Freaking 70s Show even used it for their opening theme.
Reader JW brings our attention to the Dutch Concert, which I hadn’t heard of before. The Dutch Concert, interestingly, gets two different definitions, both – of course – unflattering to the Dutch but different nevertheless. One vein of opinion classifies it as a general racket, cacophony, riot, row, ruckus, rumpus, uproar. The other defines it more specifically as a musical performance where the players are singing different songs to disastrous results. A slang dictionary from 1811 goes as far as to identify these noisemakers as “a party of Dutchmen in sundry stages of intoxication, some singing, others quarrelling, speechifying, wrangling, and so on.” Presumably this is then followed by many rounds of Dutch Oven.
I’m happy to report from first-hand experience that if you stick a yellow highlighter in your back pocket, forget, sit on it such that the cap falls off and wind up with a huge shimmering neon stain on your ass, the ink mysteriously disappears almost entirely from jeans after an interval of about 30 hours. Just hang ’em up in a ventilated area and await the magic!