I need to get one of those chain mail suits to change our housecat’s flea collar.
(Thanks to reader Sean Tompkins for sending that one along)
Unlike any such thing made nowadays, it’s heavy on info and light on preachiness.
That’s the view out my kitchen window, taken about a week ago. God’s fixated on the violets again.
Jolly version of one of the jolliest songs ever written:
I’ve been featuring a series of snowboarding videos over at the Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys, featuring an extremely calm wildman named Xavier de le Rue. One of his videographers, Guido Perrini, decided to simply point his camera at his surroundings, let it roll, and go out for a beer. This is the result.
I don’t think the average blogger understands the power of simply pointing a camera and your attention at your immediate surroundings. Most would rather be the 4,167th person to weigh in on a procedural vote in the Senate. If your surroundings are boring it’s not a clue that the procedural vote is the way to go; it’s a hint that maybe you ought to move somewhere interesting.
And in my experience, pretty much everywhere is interesting, except maybe the Senate.
Felix Mendelssohn’s Spring Song
Man I need some Spring. It’s a long road that has no turning.
That kid he bombs around the lot in my Caddie and I’ve got my heart in my throat just tossing him the keys but he never misses so what the hell. He’s dressed like he’s waiting for an organ grinder, not me, but the missus think’s he’s some kinda handsome and what’s the harm in that. Young man should be handsome and see some hubba hubba wife now and then so he knows why he’s groping that neighborhood girl in the back of a jalopy for.
Jesus she steps out like a queen. The monkey missing his tin cup holds the door and she puts out one leg with the seam running up the back and he’s transfixed like he’s a gimp at Lourdes and she’s coming down from a cloud. She’s got a halo of perfume and radiation from the silk and glitters a bit on the fingers. We go in and the Caddie gets a workout.
There’s the maitre d and he knows me and there’s no fuss except the fussing over a guy likes. The wife inspects the ceiling and Rocco says his little prayer of a tip and massages me a bit. He inspects the long memorized seating plan like it’s a lost scroll instead of his reason for being. “I might just have something near the floor ’cause I know missus, well, she can dance is what I’m sayin’.”
The coat check girl is the homely one, and even she could start a knifefight on any corner in Naples just by walking past. The girl who takes you to the table could get the Pope to reconsider.
There’s too many onions but they’re sweet. The wood pressed into a little quilt reveals itself as you make your way to the bottom of the bowl. Bread in a basket, O and V in the cruets, two ashtrays. Chianti, Franco; ten bucks and it’s the best Chianti in the world, with the cock right there on the stripe like back home. The stuffy guys, the dentists with Yankee names come in here and order sangiovese for their stringy wives to ooh and aah over and pay twenty ’cause they don’t know no better.
The dentist Yankees drift by on the dance floor and you can see them eying the real woman you got, pushing the limits of her dress every which place — Bam! Boop! Bap! — and he’s got the skinny sorority girl who moves around like a giraffe in a straightjacket and you know right off that she moves like that everywhere. That’s why he can’t stop robbing a peek at the missus when he can; they always sneak out of the house in their mind in here, the white bread. They couldn’t handle a woman like I got anyway. They should stick to the ingenues who reach for the diazepam instead of the kitchen knives when you piss her off.
In other words, please be true. In other words, I love you.
(Reader and commenter Misterarthur sent me that video, for the Hammond. Guys from Detroit know Hammond)
You know; any soundtrack that has Captain Beefheart and Henry Mancini on it can’t be all bad.
I used to be a musician.
I still play occasionally, but only if you really make me. I never paid much attention to learning to play properly. My older brother is a very fine musician and taught me how to play the electric bass in the late 1970s. I bought an axe and amp, had a lesson, and got a job working in The Met Cafe in Providence a week or so later.
Playing the bass is like owning the baseball. You’ll play all you want to if you can manage to show up and mind your business. I did.
The music business was filled with guys like me. They worked with their hands all day in construction, and played music at night. But I was the exact opposite of them, too. I played music for money and built things for the love of it.
I’ve had a few book’s worth of odd and interesting things happen to me while I was playing. I could never remember all the places I’ve played in, and I can’t even remember all the bands I’ve been in. For a while, I’d play with a different set of people four or five nights a week. I don’t miss it all that much, really.
I got to wondering how many people I could recall that I played with that would turn up on YouTube. I was tickled to find two in one video. Pinetop Perkins and Luther Guitar Junior Johnson. They’re both playing with the magnificent Muddy Waters:
Pinetop seemed ancient to me back then, twenty years ago and more, and he’s still alive today and performing at 94 years old. We played in the Civic View Inn in Providence. The dressing room for the bands was upstairs, and it was… how do I put this delicately… um, well, they had shag carpeting on all the walls and the floor and ceiling too. There was a TV bolted to the wall up in the corner; the movies they were playing on there continuously would make an animal husbandry specialist blush. I avoided the doorknob, and there was no power on earth that could compel me to enter the bathroom under any circumstances. Pinetop was bored, so we went down to the bar. I thought it was funny that Pinetop called Johnny Walker Red, his favorite, “high test,” just like my uncle does. I bought him a great deal of it. He was almost fifty years older than me, but we had more in common than I had with people I considered my friends. He wore a huge cowboy hat, was skinny as a rail, told a million stories. We had a blast. Some guys in his band didn’t show, so we opened for him and played with him too. All he needed was a piano, really.
I can’t remember where the Luther Johnson gig was. That’s him playing the guitar over in the right hand side of the frame. He was one of those guys — lively, talented, good enough to make a living at it, never making a lot of money. I remember giving him a ride back to his house. He lived in a tidy little suburb south of Boston somewhere, and was anxious to get back home to his family. Now that’s my kind of guy. I always am too.
Find Stuff:
Get Occasional Updates From Sippican Cottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything
Copyright 2024 Sippican Cottage
Small Business websites, hosting, PPC, and SEO
Recent Comments