We had seven wild turkeys in our back yard this week. We have one we caught at the supermarket in the refrigerator, too. It ain’t Xanadu, but it ain’t quite Dickens, neither.
We are grateful every day for everything we have.
For Mrs. Cottage:
HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
He’s an overnight sensation. It just took fifty years.
He’s bummed around the US and Europe forever. Odd jobs, busking on the street, working on the front end of recordings — with some notable artists, mostly otherwise. Now he’s on everything in the UK.
What he appears to be is real. People find “real” electrifying if it’s presented the right way. I imagine lots of people heaping adulation on him crab-walked past him and averted their eyes when they saw him on the street before. Real is electrifying, and real is scary. He may be from Oakland, but he sounds like he was born at the foot of Mount Belzoni, and never moved to Chicago. That real.
“Hobos are people who move around looking for work, tramps are people who move around but don’t look for work, and bums are people who don’t move and don’t work. I’ve been all three.”
The secret is to get yourself a haunted guitar:
In an interview with an Australian magazine, Seasick Steve attributes much of his unlikely success to his cheap and weather-beaten guitar, ‘The Trance Wonder’ and reveals the guitar’s mojo might come from supernatural sources. “I got it from Sherman, who is a friend of mine down in Mississippi, who had bought it down at a goodwill store. When we were down there last time he says to me, ‘I didn’t tell you when you bought it off me, but that guitar used to be haunted’. I say, ‘What are you talking about, Sherman?’. He says, ‘There’s 50 solid citizens here in Como who’ll tell you this guitar is haunted. It’s the darnedest thing – we’d leave it over in the potato barn and we’d come back in and it would be moved. You’d put it down somewhere and the next morning you’d come back and it would have moved. When you took that guitar the ghost in the barn left’. He told me this not very long ago and I said to him, ‘Sherman! Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ and he said, ‘Well the ghost was gone – I didn’t want it around here no more!’”
There’s a secret to getting a haunted guitar: You have to haunt it yourself. Steve do.
It’s because I didn’t pay attention to the last thirty years or so of his life. More or less, The Godfather is the last movie I saw him in, and I didn’t see that when it came out; too young. So no, Jor-El didn’t affect my opinion much. Neither did Apocalypse Now, which isn’t really a movie, and he’s not really in it– it’s just a big self-indulgent mess of misplaced anger and sentiment, with Marlon doing the only sensible thing in it: cashing a check and going home.
All those bad movies were Marlon’s version of an old ballplayer sitting at a card table signing autographs for a few bucks apiece. But in Brando’s case, the little kids waiting to touch the hem of his shabby muu-muu were film directors clutching a few hundred grand, and the card table was a film set. He got too big for the milieu he was in, which is very big indeed, and became Elvis or Santa Claus or something. That’s not his fault. Hell, whoever made this mashup pasted it over a Beatles song that tested the outer limits of the public’s appetite to adore anything, and there’s Brando on the album’s cover.
People should be aware of things that happened before they were born. They should pay some attention to things that matter to those younger than themselves, too. How else will you raise children properly? People should put things in context.
You can see it, if you look closely. There’s this dotted line between standing on wooden floorboards yelling whispers to a house, and having a lens an inch from your nose in an artificial world with only a theoretical audience to pitch your wares to. Marlon Brando erased this line.
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