And his brother the drummer. And his friends the drummers. And another guy that looked like him that was a drummer. And seven other guys that don’t look anything like him but pretty much are his doppelgangers. They were all drummers, too.
Until the bizarre gardening accidents, of course.
Jimmy Castor passed away this week. I dearly loved this novelty song when it came out of the transistor radio back in the day:
Jimmy Castor, a singer, saxophonist, percussionist and bandleader whose novelty songs and funk grooves brought him wide popularity in the 1970s and were later sampled for hip-hop records, died of cardiac arrest Jan. 16 in a hospital in Henderson, Nev. He was 71. The death was confirmed by his son, Jimmy Castor Jr.
As leader of the Jimmy Castor Bunch, the elder Castor combined funk and adolescent humor with such novelty songs as “Troglodyte (Cave Man),” a No. 6 Billboard pop hit in 1972, and “The Bertha Butt Boogie” two years later. Mr. Castor’s records featured a recurring cast of characters, including a caveman who chants the mantra “gotta find a woman, gotta find a woman,” and the irrepressible, full-figured dancer Bertha Butt.(Washington Post)
You can see him perform it himself, too, if you prefer:
Lotta greezy bass playing back in the seventies. Thumb and slap sorta ruined it in the eighties.
Hope there are lots of cavewomen in heaven for you to dance with, Jimmy.
Lathe turning is my kind of work. It’s quiet, and contemplative. Most all the other machines in the shop shriek and bark at you. The lathe hums and whispers. It feels more like art than heavy lifting. My little son says “daddy is sculpting again” when I do it.
And Maurice Franklin, woodturner, is my kind of guy.
If you were to rise before dawn on Christmas Eve, and walk down the empty Hackney Rd past the dark shopfronts in the early morning, you would very likely see a mysterious glow emanating from the workshop at the rear of number forty-five where spindles for staircases are made. If you were to stop and press your face against the glass, peering further into the depths of the gloom, you would see a shower of wood chips flying magically into the air, illuminated by a single light, and falling like snow into the shadowy interior of the workshop where wood turner Maurice Franklin, who was born upstairs above the shop in 1920, has been working at his lathe since 1933 when he began his apprenticeship.
In the days when Maurice started out, Shoreditch was the centre of the furniture industry and every premises there was devoted to the trade. But it has all gone long ago – except for Maurice who has carried on regardless, working at his lathe. Now at ninety-one years old, being in semi-retirement, Maurice comes in a few days each week, driving down from North Finchley in the early hours to work from four or five, until eight or nine in the morning, whenever he fancies exercising his remarkable talent at wood turning.
Make no mistake, Maurice is a virtuoso. When rooms at Windsor Castle burnt out a few years ago, the Queen asked Maurice to make a new set of spindles for her staircase and invited him to tea to thank him for it too. “Did you grow up in the East End?” she enquired politely, and when Maurice nodded in modest confirmation of this, she extended her sympathy to him. “That must have been hard?” she responded with a empathetic smile, although with characteristic frankness Maurice disagreed. “I had a loving family,” he told her plainly, “That’s all you need for a happy childhood, you don’t need palaces for that.”
Read the rest of the story of Maurice at Spitalfields Life. Great pictures, too.
(Thanks to reader Rob W. from Rowe for sending that one along)
de fixer les objets longtemps sans etre fatigue (from 2008)
Genius.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I think it’s hilarious that if you want to swap a battery out of an Apple product, you walk up to a counter called a “Genius Bar” in one of their stores. Apparently the Fuhrer of Lake Wobegon has gotten his enabling act, and has annexed the whole United States now. I don’t have an opinion one way or another on the gaudy overpriced stuff they sell; but I’m not sure I could stand to be patronized in that fashion and keep a straight face. “Who’s the genius — you, or me? Both of us, of course!” I worked for many years with my younger brother, who is possessed of a sardonic wit. Whenever he was presented with any extravagant claim of the usefulness or value of any item, he’d pause for effect and say: “Yes, but is it premium?”
In politics, the word genius gets used quite a bit, but I notice that what the word they really mean to use is shameless. I really don’t know why they keep getting those two mixed up. The last two political geniuses I can think of are Hitler and Churchill. Thank god we got both at the same time. Other than that, for 75 years it’s been all workmanlike or incompetent; take your pick.
I’ve known my share of people equipped with plenty of raw intellectual horsepower. It mostly manifests itself on one side of the ledger, of course: words or numbers. Tremendous intellectual capacity at one thing is almost always accompanied by a loopy worldview and disastrous omissions in other parts of the intellect or personality. It’s always amusing to see people with an IQ of 110 point out that since they have the same personality failings as Einstein or Feynman, they must be geniuses. Sure. Just take drugs and throw up on yourself. That will make you Hendrix, too.
Napoleon described it as: de fixer les objets longtemps sans etre fatigue. The ability to concentrate on objectives for long periods without tiring. Of course, many people think that because they hit Refresh four hundred times on an Elvis figurine auction on E-bay that that must apply to them. Sorry, no.
There is a kind of stubborness in any genius, of course, but any fool can be stubborn. You can’t win fights solely by taking a beating. To couple insight with intelligence to see around a corner and identify things that are obscure to others — that is genius. It’s exceedingly rare, it seems, though many claim to see it everywhere, including while shaving. Any genius in a public school would be drugged to a stupor now, anyway. Perhaps it’s a waste of time to talk of them any more.
Churchill was described as having “a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.” There, that’s it. Trust me; you don’t have it.
Yes, that’s Nora Jones singing a Willie Nelson song, and in a band named after Willie hisself. The Little Willies. They’re going too fast for the lyrics, but what the hell, they look like they’re having fun. And doesn’t Jim Campilongo spank that plank? Good — extra good.
Nora’s retired now, of course. She sold twenty million copies (!) of her first record, electrifying an entire generation of mopey girls and holding down the ‘eat ice cream from the tub while weeping’ fort until Adele showed up, and immediately started paging through AARP brochures, most likely.
By appearance alone, it’s hard to picture that Nora Jones’ father is Ravi Shankar. It’s like finding a Faberge egg under a Colonel Sanders chicken. Life is full of such mysteries. I can’t understand how my brother can look just like me, and still be so ugly.
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