IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Mardi Gras. Marty’s sick but of course has back to back gigs this week, had a Mardi Gras gig tonight and is still a couple of hours out, heading home. He called and spoke through sniffles. It’s a slow-burning cold and H.o.p., after trailing Kleenex for a couple of days, insisting it was allergies (did not want a cold) finally got the fever today. “I’ve got boogers coming out my nose!” But he’s not absolutely miserable. “It’s allergies,” he still insisted with the fever, slept and laid around and I would go in to sit with him when he woke up and we ended up watching PBS’s show on the Franklin northwest passage expedition, turned tragedy by botulism and lead poisoning, which was pretty depressing, but we sat there stupefied by congestion and stared at the ice, going through tissues, H.o.p. with tissue hanging out each nostril, and every time I sneezed H.o.p. would laugh.

I was reminded of the haunting movie, “The Red Tent” (Krasnaya palatka), directed by Mikheil Mikheil Kalatozishvili, Sean Connery playing Roald Amundsen, an explorer who died in the effort to rescue the crew of Umberto Nobile’s ill-fated polar flight.

Umberto Nobile decides he wants to fly over the North Pole in a blimp. His crew is composed of scientists and journalists. Winds tear the blimp apart. The surviving crew sets up a salvaged tent, paints it red and waits for help. A month passes before the world realizes they’re alive with an amateur radio operator picking up a transmission. Nobile is for some reason airlifted out first. He protests. The sick should go first. But the pilot insists he can only airlift Nobile (also injured) this time around. Then, returning, the rescue pilot crashes. The explorer, Amundsen, also dies during a rescue attempt.

Peter Finch plays Nobile, reflecting on all this as an old man, being judged in his imagination by the dead and survivors of his crew. But I scarcely recollect him in the film. It’s instead the red tent I remember. The red tent. And Connery. It has been years since I’ve seen the film, and I recollect only a little of this trial by imagination. What I instead remember is the red tent and the waiting. The questions of courage or vanity. Nobile in a warm place, years distant, meeting again the ice, in what is successfully a story about each of the individuals.

Wikipedia gives the following:

After two preliminary flights from Ny-Ålesund (Kings Bay), the flight to the North Pole began on May 23, 1928, but ended in a crash on the ice on May 25, close to 81° 14′ latitude north, 28° 14′ longitude east. The crew managed to salvage several items from the crashed airship, including food, a radio transmitter and, famously, a red tent. The drifting sea ice later took the survivors towards Foyn and Broch islands. Incompetence on the part of Captain Romagna meant that the survivors’ distress signals were not picked up for several weeks, and despite the presence of Italian ski-troops on board in case of just such an emergency, no effort was made by the Italian authorities to mount a search, let alone a rescue effort.

Thus it was left to the international community, and in particular Norway, Sweden and Finland to begin the first polar air rescue effort. Several privately owned ships which had been chartered by polar scientists and explorers also participated. Even Amundsen forgot his past differences, but went missing when his overloaded seaplane disappeared en route to the search headquarters. His body was never found. After a month of privation, the first rescue plane, a Swedish airforce Fokker ski plane, piloted by Lieutenant Einar Lundborg landed near the crash site. Nobile had prepared a detailed evacuation plan, with the most seriously wounded men at the top of the list. However Lundborg, possibly on orders from his superiors, but also possibly on orders from the Italian government, refused to take anyone but Nobile, arguing that he was desperately needed to co-ordinate the rescue operations. Nobile was reluctantly airlifted to Ryss Island, base camp of Swedish and Finnish air rescue efforts. However, when Lundborg returned to pick up a second survivor he crashed his plane on landing and became trapped with the others. Eventually, Nobile reached the Città di Milano where he was dismayed at the incompetence he found. His attempts to co-ordinate the international rescue effort were blocked, and when he threatened to leave he was placed under virtual arrest by Captain Romagna. His telegrams to the survivors still on the ice, as well as to various people involved in the rescue, were heavily censored, and he was forced to sign a communique implying cowardice for being the first to be evacuated. Eventually the rest of his crew were rescued by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin. Nobile wanted to continue the search for six crew who were swept away in the envelope of the airship when it crashed, but he was ordered back to Rome with the others, in a locked train.

I remember that horrifying scene of the dirigible tearing apart and one half sailing on. Captured well a moment when human companions cease to be ordinary and enter into the territory of mythic giants repeating over and over the same actions, resolution lost forever, Sisyphus doomed never to complete his travail.

Some websites give a 15 man crew with 6 flying off in the remnant of the dirigible and 8 of 9 surviving the crash. Fiddlersgreen (below) states that there was a crew of 17, including Nobile. That 7 were blown away in the remnant of the ship, and a mechanic died in the crash. 2 Italian naval officers and a scientist composed the party that set out on foot for help, and of those three the naval officers survived.

It was now six weeks since the original crash and more than a month since three of the crew had set out across the ice to find help. As the weather worsened, making it impossible for other planes to locate or approach the camp, the situation looked increasingly bleak. Yet, unknown to the small group waiting patiently on the ice, the Russian icebreakers Krassin and Malygin were steaming through the fog toward them. During one break in the clouds, Krassin had been able to launch its spotter plane, which had detected the two naval officers walking across the ice, and the ship had picked them up. Dr Malmgren had had to be left behind on their journey, close to death, and his body was never found. The very next day, Krassin arrived at the camp, and the five remaining survivors were safe at last. It had been a tragic and disappointing follow-up to the success of the Norge expedition, and the death toll was still rising. Apart from the four mechanics, the two journalists, and the scientist who had disappeared with the remains of the airship, another mechanic had been killed in the crash and Dr Malmgren had died on the trek across the ice. There was still worse to come. In the search for the survivors, a Russian plane from the icebreaker Malygin vanished with all its crew, as did a French flying boat carrying three Frenchmen and two Norwegians, Lief Dietrichsen and Nobile’s arch-rival, Roald Amundsen.

Source

Human endeavor is mysterious, what compels to continue when faced with a horizon of ice, whether intellectual or spiritual resolution or force of life, or force of life influencing the former. To rise daily to that monotonous white and no surety of rescue, blanketed with cold. And remarkable also the compulsion to rescue, which “The Red Tent” well captured, the international effort to recover the crew, even at the expense of more life. The excitement of picking up the transmission from the crew members. The desperate determination to reach them in time.

Odd, humankind. A grand sort of nobility with tales of rescues such as with the Italia. But then thinks little of sacrificing the lives of thousands, even millions, to war and economic and social injustices. Just as stories of a ship captain’s loyalty to crew or abandonment of them captures the imagination, the actions of those captains scrutinized as the epitome of character-defining responsibility or lack thereof, all secure in the knowledge that a captain should never abandon those who depend on his or her judgment. And yet heads of countries seem to not face the same scrutiny, as if moral decreptitude is expected in the drawing room where leaders gather and discuss the business of millions.

Odd, humankind.

H.o.p. is furious at me. He believes I lost a drawing of his. I probably did. I probably threw it away. He draws ten thousand pictures a day and it’s impossible to keep them all, which he would do if he could. We haven’t the room so I sort them out occasionally and throw away the obvious prep drawings and many others. He says, anyway, that up front was a drawing for an animation he was doing and it’s gone now. So, he is mad. I think it is also the cold. We have both hit cold-cranky.

Attempting to clean up the enormous mess of files on my computer, art and photos everywhere, I started sorting through all our digital files from the middle of 2004 when we got a digital camera. I was also sorting out pics of H.o.p.’s art and have been reflecting the past few days as to what happened where throughout 2004 I did a pretty good job of recording and scanning H..p.’s art and this somehow collapsed in 2005. I realized, going through all the folders of photos what happened.

Everything became art. And it became too much to keep up with.

Going through the photos I realize there isn’t a single thing eventually that isn’t art or performance here at home. I knew that at the time but it has been so much a part of daily life that I didn’t really how *everything* was art. There were no more plain photos of H.o.p. It was H.o.p. in costume, H.o.p. performing, not just drawings and scans of drawings but photo after photo of digital drawings he was doing on multiple computer programs, turning everything into art, spoons rearranged to be art, whole sections of rooms rearranged to be art, a sudden multiplying of sequence art, photo after photo of sequenced drawings or puppet performances. And finally H.o.p. took over the camera (my dad had given me a better one) and began taking hundreds of photos that were all art exercises, conceptual art, blurred and apparently nonsensical images as well that he did on purpose going for a particular effect, photographing everything not to record it but to make something new, to make a story. And ultimately hundreds of digital photos we had also to discard as there was no saving all of them, still leaving a copious record. He’d also begun experimenting with video but then our camera broke and our replacement camera turned out not to have sound, which took a lot of the fun out of it. And now tons of animations. He was going through them last night and was scrutinizing his older ones. “That’s no good,” he said. “All my older ones look just like separate pictures. They don’t look like animation.” He was saying he didn’t want others to see them because they weren’t like real animations and weren’t any good. I told him no, they were excellent for what he was doing at the time. That he needed to do those to learn, all part of the process.

Below is a picture he took in February. Deliberate. He plays with the camera continually, jiggling, doing high contrasts, dark against light, seeing what he can get out of it. “Isn’t that cool?” he says. I was going to adjust the levels in Photoshop but it softened the contrast and he didn’t want that. “Change it back,” he said. “I want it like it was.” He had done several videos first, the camera on the chair, so he would know exactly where to stand to get the effect he wanted.

There were a number of images that were almost all white, such as all white with a streak of blue-white, that he got out of jiggling the camera wildly while taking pictures of the white plastic venetian blinds. “Isn’t that cool?” he said. Done deliberately.

And always loads of stills from animated movies or flash animations so he can study them.

Against ceiliing light
2006
H.o.p., age 8
photograph

It’s of Tim and Moby cutting off a lightswitch. Keep in mind that he’s working under the constraint of a primitive program in which he can only use 18 frames. He’s really getting the idea of slowing down the action. (And yes he spelled “off” incorrectly.) The blue dots at the end of the short are Moby’s lights coming on, Moby being the robot.

I know H.o.p. would appreciate a comment.

Marty Kearns is on keys backing up Heaven Davis last night and tonight at the Atlanta History Center. The program is called Wild Women Sing the Blues. In the band are Marty’s old friends Kenny Kilgore on guitar and Roger Gregory on bass.

Roger just moved back to Atlanta after his house was demolished in Katrina. He’s waiting in Atlanta until his house can be rebuilt.

Roger cofounded Blind Willie’s here back in the late 80s, and was for a long time only a Blues and R&B club. Marty played there for years in bands backing up artists such as Lotsa Poppa.

Here’s an animation H.o.p. did of a robot turning and walking. From some time back in late fall, early winter.

I noted yesterday that Marty played for years with singer Lotsa Poppa. Mostly at Blind Willie’s but also at such clubs as the venerated Royal Peacock, and the Libra Ballroom, on the same bill as people lilke Bobby “Blue” Bland. I used to have the greatest rainbow-colored posters of those dates but one day had taken them down off the wall and a cat of ours sprayed them. Ah, you don’t know how it pained me to lose all those posters.

Lotsa Poppa has been quite ill the past couple of years. But he was a great singer and in 2001 the Georgia General Assembly passed a resolution honoring him.

A couple of pics of Lotsa Poppa are here and a link to an article Creative Loafing did on him a few years ago.

The below resolution gives the impression that the name of the Down to Earth Blues Band backing Poppa was dissolved completely when he moved back to Atlanta from Philadelphia but, in fact, that name was retained for years with a group of musicians he’d pulled together here, which included Marty. There were occasional shifts in who was playing as most everyone at some time or another was on the road with other bands, sometimes at length, and sometimes players just move on.

The early Atlanta Down to Earth Blues Band was Van Miller on bass, T. K. Lively on drums (who left soon thereafter to go back to Wet Willie and was replaced with Bobby Pridgen), Felix Reyes on guitar and Marty Kearns (Martin Kearns) on keys. That shifted over the years to Mike Lorenz (Creative Loafing obit link), Rick Hinkle and Tommy Knight playing guitar at different times, and Bill Stewart and Tom Staley on drums. Roger Gregory played bass for a while. And Billy Burke too on bass. There were others but those were the longest term members I believe, talking with Marty about it. The later band was Atlanta Heat (also concurrent for a time, but I don’t know for how long), which had a different line-up and had his son, Greg, playing guitar–also a great bass player but he didn’t play bass with the band. The Down to Earth Blues Band was the one that played Blind Willie’s backing Poppa.

Marty played with Lotsa Poppa off and on from about 1989 to about 1998. After Mike died in July of 2001, Poppa asked him to come back and help hold the band together until they could regroup, and so he played another three months in 2001.

I’ve grabbed a couple of photos of the band off the Lotsa Poppa website. The band there is misidentified as The Shadows because Roger Gregory played in The Shadows, but Roger Gregory is nowhere in site in the below pic.

Photo frrom Lotsa Poppa’s website maintained by J.T. Blues.

The photo is of Lotsa Poppa at Blind Willie’s and is from the middle years (the photos at the site aren’t very good and wouldn’t I like to get a decent one and do a painting of him). Marty Kearns (Martin Kearns) is on keys. Tom Staley on drums. Mike Lorenz is on guitar (during his Telecaster period, Marty says, after his Jazz Master was stolen and before he found it at a pawn shop and got it back) and Billy Burke on bass.

Tom Staley was with NRBQ from 1968 to 1974, and if you don’t know NRBQ then I’ve got not much use for you. One of my favorite records of all time is NRBQ’s collaboration with Carl Perkins, Boppin the Blues, I listened to it nearly nonstop on a couple of road trips, so needless to say I was more than a little excited when Marty eventually played with Tom for a year. Marty’s fuzzy on what’s going on in the picture as he and Tom were both in the Excello’s and Down to Earth Blues Band at the same time, but it’s probably the Down to Earth Blues Band playing as Billy is on bass and Roger Dukes was on bass in the Excello’s. Lorenz was on guitar in both bands.

Gets confusing, doesn’t it? Pretty incestuous here in Atlanta.

Anyway it does my heart some kind of good to be able to mention NRBQ, Carl Perkins and Martin Kearns and me in the same paragraph (since I’m attached by way of being attached to Martin who played with Tom who played with NRBQ and Carl Perkins). And to show just how fucked the public is, here’s a link to the no-longer-existent album at Amazon with only two fuckin’ reviews and the first one is by an idiot who’s talking about the panning being different from the stage set-up. This is a vital piece of rockabilly history! Why are there are only two fuckin’ reviews, and one of them is a total geek review?

Poppa certainly did know how to work a crowd, and when he wanted to Poppa could sing the best R&B of anyone, delivering an Otis Redding tune second only to Otis. The audience wanted and went for side accoutrements which were only tossed in because otherwise they’d no idea they were listening to music, and I guess that’s why there’s showmanship. Poppa could give a profound performance that would fall flat if they didn’t have the bells and whistles as a Pavlovian prod. I remember nights sitting in the audience flabbergasted and disheartened by a crowd shunning a soulful rendition for the following flash. Which can be bittering.

Poppa is a sweet, gentle guy. Marty encourages me to note “once you got to know him, which could take a while” because he does have a bit of a reputation. Which I didn’t know anything about because Poppa was never anything but wonderful with me and liked to chat it up a little on the phone when he’d call for Marty. He was warm and welcoming whenever I showed up and after H.o.p. was born he never failed to ask about him and always sounded like he cared.

Poppa had been beat up by a nasty, hard business.

I would like to say something about a grueling schedule that most people don’t know about. They walk into a club and sit and I don’t know what they think the performers do for a living because it ain’t off a single club gig that they’re feeding themselves and family. Poppa, like everyone else, was traveling all the time, week and weekends. He had a 6 day a week schedule, sometimes playing a couple of gigs a day, and would get up to the stage and do two and two-and-a-half hour sets if he had a good, responsive audience. Poppa always had at least two bands and would use pick-up bands on the traveling gigs. So a person goes in and sits down and they look at the band and they think this is what they do, where they make their living, when it’s enough living for a little bread-and-butter and for the rest of the pieces of your bread-and-butter you’re out playing with other bands here, there and everywhere. Poppa would often be playing two clubs on the same night where he’d finish up a set and drive to the other club, do a set and drive back. Rugged.

I say he “got up to the stage” as at Blind Willie’s he was worried about the steps to the stage and wouldn’t climb them. You’ll notice in the photo he’s standing in front of the stage. Plus he was once a pro football player and that had busted up his knees. When he couldn’t play ball any longer he went into singing.

“He had the best scream of anyone I’ve ever heard, outside of James Brown,” Marty says.

With whom Marty had the pleasure of playing in Augusta. James Brown. In the early 80’s, he used to come into the club where Marty was playing and sit in two or three nights a week. The club was owned by the guy who gave James his first job singing, as a matter of fact. I never was fortunate to be there when James was. The band was all that was left of the only white band that had ever toured with James Brown. He did sing his own material but he didn’t want to do his own material. Wanted to do Willie Nelson and Lynard Skynard. He wanted to do a southern rock record but the label wasn’t buying that idea.

Poppa was mentioned in the book Sweet Soul Music. A funny/not-so-funny story about his losing all his money in a poker game to Sam Cooke? Poppa won the money the night before and Sam told him to send the money home. But Poppa didn’t and Sam won it back the following night. Poppa would go to the dog track in Birmingham and had it timed so he’d walk into the club right when he was to be called up to the stage. Because the band would do a set first. And sometimes it was nerve-wracking.

The Creative Loafing article states Poppa did some early recordings but I don’t see anything else about them on the internet. Marty says he did some CDs of live recordings fromBlind Willie’s, but all those were when Marty was out on the road. I don’t see anything on the internet. Just sold it off the stage. Anyway, we need to get a few recordings so H.o.p. will have them so he can hear the Lotsa Poppa part of what his dad was doing before he was born. There are tapes that exist of Marty playing with him.

Frank Edwards, who died in 2002 at the age of 93, would come in every Monday night to hear Lotsa Poppa and the band. He was an old blues one man band guy. Played guitar, drums, high-hat and harmonica. He would have a cup of coffee with whipped cream and a cherry and always sat at the end of the bar closest to the stage. It was his seat.

What luck. Fortunately at the Lotsa Poppa website is also a photo showing Frank Edwards. Didn’t know that when I was writing my initial draft of this. Then went deeper into the website to look at the slide show.

Photo frrom Lotsa Poppa’s website maintained by J.T. Blues.

Again it’s Lotsa Poppa at Blind Willie’s. Marty on keys at left, Tom Staley, Billy Burke on bass and Mike Lorenz on guitar. And there is Frank Edwards seated on the far right with the hat on, at the end of the bar.

And this is what you saw from the stage at Blind Willie’s.

Photo frrom Lotsa Poppa’s website maintained by J.T. Blues.

Marty says the above set-up would have been a Shadow’s set up as it’s Bob Page’s keyboard in the corner.

It was Blind Willie’s that I had in my mind for the latter chapters of UNENDING WONDERS OF S UBATOMIC WORLD. No, not it literally, a fiction, but it was Blind Willie’s I was picturing, picked up and transplanted to Utah.

Marty says it’s odd to him that he’ll never again hear Lotsa Poppa say, “Slow blues. Lotsa guitar. Marty play that Leslie.”

Georgia General Assembly
02 LC 18 1757

Senate Resolution 824
By: Senator James of the 35th

A RESOLUTION

Commending Julius “Lotsa Poppa” High, Jr.; and for other purposes.

WHEREAS, Julius “Lotsa Poppa” High, Jr., was born to Reverend and Mrs. Julius “Lotsa Poppa” High, Sr., in Atlanta, Georgia, and attended David T. Howard High School; and

WHEREAS, his early musical influences included such renowned artists as Bobby “Blue” Bland and Sam Cook as well as his own love of gospel music and he began his distinguished musical career in 1960 as the lead singer for The Royals; and

WHEREAS, he formed his own professional singing group called Lee Moses and The Show Stoppers which performed every weekend at the Royal Peacock known as the “Apollo Theater” of the South and his group played with musical greats that included Sam Cook, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Arthur Prysock, and Brook Benton; and

WHEREAS, he has also performed with legendary blues artists such as Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and Johnny Taylor and also performed with popular performers including Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Little Willie John, and Ruth Bound; and

WHEREAS, he relocated to Philadelphia where he performed at the Uptown and Apollo Theaters and he also formed a new group called the Down to Earth Blues Band in Boston which toured Canada, upstate New York, and Detroit and after 11 years´ performing and touring in and around Boston he returned to Atlanta, Georgia; and

WHEREAS, he played at the Lithonia Country Club with blues greats such as Sonny Boy Williams, Howling Wolf, Elmo James, Gatemouth Brown, Sugar Pie Disanto, and Faye Adams and enjoyed an extended engagement at one of Atlanta´s premier nightclubs, Blind Willie´s and currently is performing with the quartet called Atlanta´s Heat Blues Review; and

WHEREAS, it is abundantly fitting and proper that the extraordinary career of this stellar musician be recognized appropriately.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE SENATE that the members of this body commend Julius “Lotsa Poppa” High, Jr., for his many decades of outstanding contributions to the world of music and extend to him their best wishes for continued success in the future.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Secretary of the Senate is authorized and directed to transmit an appropriate copy of this resolution to Julius “Lotsa Poppa” High, Jr.

Brrr, chills. This time H.o.p. does a werewolf animation. With captions. He had to do two separate files as the rudimentary program only handles 18 frames. Why would a caption require its own file? Because the W grows werewolf ears, that’s why! Anyway, a werewolf and neopet go up onto a cliff to howl in the moonlight. Notice also how, as the werewolf turns its head from left to right, the earth’s shadow passes over the moon.

You have to appreciate how much time it takes an eight-year-old to do these things, especially on this level of involved movement.

Two new drawings painted in Photoshop have also been added in his 2006 gallery. With Elmo he deliberated on the idea of the moon and cloud reflected in the window, and added shading on the side of Elmo away from the moon.

Love the antenna poking through the clouds in the below drawing.

H.o.p. enjoys the idea of people looking at his work and putting it up on the blog. Is very excited about his gallery, for which I need to do his own entry web page. He comes over and wants to read this entry and smiles and starts talking about other things he wants to do in the future to put up. And he brings up his robot animation I posted yesterday and wants to read the entry for that.

ANNOUNCER: Other shampoos just work on your hair. But Chambraigne travels down each follicle and bores into your skull, depositing magical knowledge crystals.

TV’S AL ROKER: (”Heavy User”): Lather your way to a new intelligence.

(CHAMBRAIGNE LOGO OVER VIDEO OF MAN IN TOGA PUTTING ON CROWN OF LEAVES)

ANNOUNCER: With Chambraigne. The shampoo of kings. (Faster) Made by Carl and Sons. Continued use may result in limb loss.

(CAMERA PULLS BACK TO REVEAL IMAGE ON OLD-FASHIONED TV SCREEN)

SPACE GHOST: Finally, a product for me! I believe every word that man just said, because it’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

(TIME LAPSE - SPACE GHOST HAS LATHER ON HIS HOOD AND IS SURROUNDED BY BOXES OF CHAMBRAIGNE)

SPACE GHOST: Ha ha ha ha! I’m already smart enough to know this is working!

(DRAMATIC MUSIC, SHOT OF SMALL, GLOWING PLANET TOPPED WITH A HEALTHY HEAD OF HAIR, CUT TO EXT. OF CARL & SONS )

VOICE: This is a proud day for Carl and Sons, son. (TWO BRAINS HOVER IN SHADOW)

LARGE BRAIN (CARL): We’ve sold enough Chambraigne to purchase this…television.

(OPENING TITLES PLAY ON TV SCREEN)

SMALL BRAIN (SON): (incoherent squeaking)

CARL: Yes, son. Fetch daddy’s hard plastic eyes so he can see the TV.

(SON RUNS OFF SCREEN, CRASHING NOISES ARE HEARD)

CARL: On the dresser! You are an imbecile!

Source

Idyllopus scans “Roy Smeck’s Modern Method for Hawaiian Guitar”. Why? Because I can and I’ve a long-abiding love for Hawaiian guitar back to when I was about eight years of age at least, and god only knows where I got the door through which the interested entered, but the interest entered, as best I can remember, at some restaurant in Richland. I remember looking up at a television in the waiting area and thinking, “Oh, wow, that is about the most mysterious, beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.” Go to Amazon and listen through the cuts on this Smeck CD. Open Source Audio has the 1928 selection Tough Picking.

Earlier was having a very nice time sitting here eating strawberries and listening to Entropy Circus’ The Goats & The Peacock from Open Source Audio. I came across it through doing a search for Caruso. And there was Entropy Circus, because it incorporates Caruso in one of the tracks. I started listening and pretty much immediately felt good (the flu/cold must be close to vanquished I thought) and got the strawberries, which have been sitting untouched in the refrigerator since the beginning of this cold/flu due to disinterest. I settled in. And after a while of listening…a long while (going through the process of first searching out who Entropy Circus is and reading some and then slipping into ancient memories of electronica, with which I’ve an intimate relationship, Marty having done a good bit with it back in the late 70s and early 80s, but one moves on and it was something I have not been inclined to give an ear to for years, unimpressed with most I heard)…I realized I was about as relaxed as I’ve been in a long while. Remarkably relaxed. This was excellent drone music.

These tracks do definitely tamper with the brain waves, despite the fact I was making comparisons, finding resemblances between this and that and electronica and rock past. Altered my brain and magically removed annoyances. Made me want a popsicle, eventually, so I got one out and my taste buds were there, for which reason I threw away the first selected, accidentally having chosen cherry, and went for the orange which is as close as I can get to eating oranges as I’m allergic to citrus, and was surprised to really taste the popsicle from the tint of bitter orange rind to the woody stick at the core. Which I credit to Entropy Circus. Interesting.

The New York Times runs a report on Wal-Mart eliciting bloggers to paraphrase spoonfed canned PR for Wal-Mart. After all, if one pro-Wal-Mart blogger was caught writing exactly what another one was writing, the public would get suspicious, wouldn’t it?

Brian Pickrell of the Iowa Voice blog is one such individual, using his blog “to attack state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance.”

I especially like this.

…he has written at least three postings that contain language identical to sentences in e-mail from Mr. Manson. In one, which Mr. Pickrell attributed to a “reader,” he reported that Wal-Mart was about to announce that a store in Illinois received 25,000 applications for 325 jobs. “That’s a 1.3 percent acceptance rate,” the message read. “Consider this: Harvard University (undergraduate) accepts 11 percent of applicants. The Navy Seals accept 5 percent of applicants.”

Hahahaha. Yeah, we’re all in real good shape when Wal-Mart gets 25,000 applications for 325 jobs. There’s just so much wrong there we can let slide for the moment that Pickrell is boosting Wal-Mart, as a blogger, for no compensation. I guess that means Pickrell is honorable? No, he’s an idiot. If Wal-Mart wrote and asked me to boost them, I’d ask what they were going to do for me.

Hahahaha. Comparing Wal-Mart to Harvard and the Navy Seals. Valor and brains. That’s supposed to be your association. Instead of reading and thinking, “Gee, our country sucks big time unemployment-wise,” you’re instead supposed to nod a ponderous head and conclude that somehow Wal-Mart is more selective when it comes to patriotic valor and Ivy League brains.

Wal-Mart’s blogging initiative is part of a ballooning public relations campaign developed in consultation with Edelman to help Wal-Mart as two groups, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, aggressively prod it to change. The groups operate blogs that receive posts from current and former Wal-Mart employees, elected leaders and consumers.

Edelman also helped Wal-Mart develop a political-style war room, staffed by former political operatives, which monitors and responds to the retailer’s critics, and helped create Working Families for Wal-Mart, a new group that is trying to build support for the company in cities across the country.

Working Familiies for Walmart, huh? Its website has a page titled, “What’s at stake”:

Working families choose to shop at their neighborhood Wal-Mart stores to save money, save time and to get everything they need in one convenient place. And associates choose to work at Wal-Mart because it offers good wages, solid benefits and a chance at a career. But some union leaders in Washington, D.C. don’t want working families to benefit from Wal-Mart. These union leaders want to tell us — America’s working families — where to shop and work…working families everywhere know what the unions won’t acknowledge: Wal-Mart is good for America’s working families. Working families continue to shop at Wal-Mart and line up by the thousands for jobs at Wal-Mart stores because Wal-Mart continues to save working families money and provide good jobs with competitive pay and affordable health care. It really is time for the union leaders to let working families decide where to shop and work.

Their big proponent, splashed all over the home page is Civil Rights leader Andrew Young.

Andrew Young says,

“Those who have committed their lives to helping the poor believe that if more companies followed Wal-Mart’s lead, and provided opportunity and savings to those who need it most, more Americans who are battling poverty would be able to ascend the rungs of the ladder that leads to the American dream.”

What? But yes! One reads right. Indeed, it was announced on 2006 Feb 27th that Andrew Young is to “head” Working Families for Wal-Mart, their public face, giving interviews and “publishing opinion articles defending Wal-Mart.”

Andrew Young is head of GoodWorks International, of which Wal-Mart is the largest financial backer.

Andrew Young was a former mayor here.

Not that I’m one who goes aound talking up American Dreams–I don’t–but, man, makes me wonder what kind of American Dream Andrew Young has on his mind. If Andrew Young was stripped tonight, in his sleeep, of everything he possessed, and found himself in dreamland working as a Wal-Mart stock person, casheir or greeter, what do you want to bet he’d wake up screaming?

My head hurts.

The Black Commentator writes,

Black History Month 2006 ended on a jarring note. Andrew Young, a former member of Dr. King’s inner circle at SCLC, who went on to serve three terms in Congress, a stint as UN ambassador and two terms as mayor of Atlanta before cashing out his Freedom Movement chips for a lucrative career as an international “business consultant,” decisively spat upon the movement for human rights and economic justice that he spent his early career helping to build. Young announced on February 27, 2006 that he would chair Working Families for Wal-Mart, a media sock-puppet for the ruthless multinational firm. The cynical misuse of his stature as an icon of the Freedom Movement, preacher, former elected official, and honored elder in black America to mask and obscure the crimes of his corporate client marks Mr. Young as nothing more nor less than a corporate whore.

The article is well worth reading.

Congratulations to Wymsey! Wymsey made it into the NY Times today, via a cooking article which I’ll publish in full here as it will one day become subscription content.

Wymsey is the wonderful absurdist creation of Charles Ivermee, and to find out more about why I’m posting this here, skip to below the article.

Take Egg Off Speed Dial
By PAUL ADAMS
Published: March 8, 2006

FOLLOWING a detailed recipe forwarded to me by a friend, I waited until 7 p.m., when my free minutes begin. I stood an egg in an egg cup between two short stacks of books. With my new Treo 650 I called my old Samsung cellphone, answering it when it rang. I laid the two phones on the books so their antennas pointed at the egg. Supposedly, this would give me a cooked egg.

But after 90 minutes, with the Treo’s fresh battery running low, the egg was still cold. Maybe, I thought, this method uses some sort of telephonic radiation to coagulate protein without heat? I whacked it on the table and watched raw egg ooze out. I poached it later by conventional means.

The recipe I used had been making the rounds on the Internet for the last month. It originally appeared in 2000, in the Wymsey Chronicle: wymsey.co.uk/wymchron/cooking.htm.

The Chronicle, a single-handed creation of a 60-year-old English legal archivist named Charles Ivermee, documents life in the fictional village of Wymsey. The original egg-cooking article, a step-by-step how-to ostensibly written by one Suzzanna Decantworthy, appears in a droll weekend supplement that also features a woodland hunt for wild tofu. Stripped from its whimsical context, though, the recipe, just offbeat enough to be credible, has been widely forwarded by e-mail.

The caprice of the Web snapped up the article only recently, with mentions last month on slashdot.org, boingboing.net and other sites. “Last year the page could expect around 100 visits per week,” Mr. Ivermee said. In the week of Feb. 6, when the Slashdot community noticed the recipe and extensively debated its veracity, that number increased to about 132,000 would-be cooks.

Clearly, people are eager to have their technophobias confirmed, but a cellphone’s power output is half a watt at most, less than a thousandth of what a typical microwave oven emits.

But those of us who are inclined to cook without a stove are not without recourse. I have independently confirmed the deliciousness of eggs poached in a dishwasher, fried under a hot iron, shirred on a radiator and coddled in a drip coffee maker.

Back in the dinosaur days of the internet, 7 years ago, I came across the Parish Board of the Micro-state of Wymsey which had its own Chronicle. A humorous chronicle with a very silly absurd forum. I’ve no memory of how in the world I got there but it was by accident. The place was composed of characters and it’s not very well known that I’m a triplet, but I am, and I told the second of those third’s, Irene de Mandible about the forum and she leaped right in. And if you think I go about informing and directing Irene toward things in a regular way, no, I don’t, as she is an embarrassment. This was my first and only time, a leap which meant that Irene eventually became Wymsey’s ambassador to “the area from the Mexican border with the USA to Cape Horn in Chile and all off-earth territories.” Which was right up Irene’s alley, the off-earth territories part. She was only confused by the other parts.

The website in which, at the time, I was investing my energy was Bigsofa, a subdivision of which was The Urlybird Times. I had intended to periodically do real interviews with people and ended up only doing a few, and among them were two interviews touching upon Wymsey. The first was with expert, Irene de Mandible because she is after all one of my three/thirds and was thus easy.

URLYBIRD: What inspired your interest in Wymsey?

IRENE: Hmmm. I honestly don’t recollect. I’m not sure I was interested in Wymsey. It just happened to be there.

URLYBIRD: Many things just happen to be there.

IRENE: Yes, but not where my ancestor, Adam de Mandible, happened to be as well. I understood he might have come to America from Wymsey in the 17th century. Wymsey appeared to me to have its share of knowledgable historians, and as I was at that time researching my family history I thought I would post to the parish notice board and see if anyone knew anything.

URLYBIRD: This was in September of 1999.

IRENE: You HAVE done your research, haven’t you? At first the Wymsical-powers-that-be insisted Adam de Mandible had no association with Wymsey. They insisted so strongly, despite the fact there was no evidence Adam de Mandible didn’t have anything to do with Wymsey, that I began to wonder why this was, why they would be so adamant about it. I mean, they were so adamant. Then it was later discovered that my Mandible ancestors did, in fact, attain Wymsey during the time of William the Conqueror. A family of cartographers. John Applegate was ever so helpful. I’m forever in his debt for this bit of illuminating information on my ancestors. Well, not forever.

URLYBIRD: They attained Wymsey…

IRENE: Went to Wymsey. Reached Wymsey. Achieved Wymsey. Yes, they attained Wymsey. I meant what I said. I don’t know if they were charmed by Wymsey and decided to make it their home, or if there simply wasn’t anyone left to dispossess, but, however they might have come by Wymsey…

Somehow Irene managed to wind up that interview referencing Naom Chomsky.

Another interview was with Pookah, twin sister of “expert Irene de Mandible”, which means she is the third of the thirds after Irene was reported as missing after Urlybird’s interview with her (being a big time webmaster of Bigsofa I didn’t want to let on that I was related to these people I was interviewing, which would have destroyed my credibility as a web journalist, though I did manage to drum up several very real people to interview). And Jeff, Irene’s husband, was interviewed as well.

POOKAH: Irene and I, we’re not much alike. At least I don’t think we are. But we’ve always had this psychic bond. This metaphysical sympathy, a link connecting us.

JEFF: IF THEYRE NOT TRAINED WELL SHE HAS TO KEEP THE DOGS ON A CHAIN WHEN SHES PAINTING THEM SHES A GREAT CANINE PORTRAIT ARTIST ONE OF THE BEST THERE IS SHES TRIED PAINTING CANINE PORTRAITS USING PHOTOS BUT ITS NOT THE SAME I PAINT TOO SO I UNDERSTAND BUT MY SPECIALTY IS PAINTING GUITARS HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE GIBSON #$% SERIES AQUA AUTOBODY PAINT #@$% WITH THE SUNBURST FINISH AND ALLIGATOR CRAWLING UP BESIDE THE BETTY PAGE TYPE BEACH BEAUTY SAYING WISH YOU WERE HERE HAVING A GREAT TIME I DID THAT THEY ARE NOW ALL SNAPPED UP ON THE JAPANESE COLLECTORS MARKET

NYTimes, Slashdot, Boingboing, etc! Talk about Wymsey suddenly getting its extended fifteen minutes!

But we, in the know, were there first, way back when, in 1999 and 2000. Never mind that Wymsonians occasionally intimated that I was stomping around where I’d no business being. That business about the sunstone or whatever it was.

But I loved Wymsey so damn much…well, Irene did, that she couldn’t help herself, once y’know I’d put her in contact with them.

I got up from the keypad to get H.o.p. something to eat and was thinking how I might write in a humorous way of Irene’s ultimate disappearance from the internet, considered what the story might be and how I might write of how Irene was “in love” with Wymsey and how she was lost, totally lost, when Charles Ivermee turned out to have a personal life and got hitched and how she hasn’t appeared once on the internet since then. And up leaps son H.o.p. and follows me and smiles at me and says, “I’m in love with you, mommy” not one second later. Which is the kind of thing an 8 year old will say to his mom, though he’s never used the words “in love” before. For which reason I asked him what he’d said and he repeated. We hadn’t spoken in fifteen minutes as I’d been writing and he was drawing and as soon as I stood and turned to the kitchen and thought the words “in love” blam up leaps H.o.p. from his seat and out of the blue announces, “I’m in love with you, mommy”. Which means wow what about love even humorous absurdist spin-story fabrications, that any thought of love enters the universal unconscious and blam up hops H.o.p. to announce, beaming, yes, the great highway upon which we communal travel does exist, or may simply mean yes that the way to a boy’s heart is through his stomach, considering I had walked into the kitchen.

Anyway, please, take some time from your day and read the latest in Wymsey droll at the Wymsey Chronicle and dip into the archives. You can’t imagine how pleased I am at the numbers of others who have been recently acquainted with the Wymsey wit, even though it slammed the servers in a harsh way.

And again congrats from me, Marty and H.o.p.

Lance Mannion last week compared Kelly’s Heroes and MASH in a post at American Street, Kelly’s Heroes are my Heroes. Which also got some commentary here.

I ended up bringing up Nashville and thus got a pointer over to an Altman Blogfest that was occurring this past weekend. I didn’t participate as it’s difficult for me to break Altman down into nuggets, though the bits and pieces are what Altman excels at spying and draping threads between. If Nashville was geomtry only, all its threads and hubs would look like a Red Skelton stage after he was done with a wallpapering skit.

Another reason I didn’t feel like being involved in the Altman blogathon is that in UNENDING WONDERS OF A SUBATOMIC WORLD I expressly refer to Altman once, via Nashville, a song in the film mentioned. I only finished and published the book at the beginning of February and am still saturated with if, remain very much in its territory. It’s difficult for me to explain why I would consequently feel like I’m tiptoeing around a household in which a child is sleeping, but I do…

And when I think of Altman I think of that song and I tiptoe.

The song that I’d made reference to was, “It don’t worry me.”

In the movie, one of the many subplots is the story of Albuquerque who is determined to get a chance to sing in Nashville. We know little about her other than she is determined to sing, her husband is determined for her not to sing (one has to draw their own conclusions as to their relationship and why) and looking for an opportunity, during a traffic jam caused by a wreck, she bolts from the vehicle driven by her husband amd he spends the rest of the movie chasing after her. At film’s end, when the emotionally frail, exhausted Barbara Jean has been shot at the Parthenon, in the ensuing confusion–fans stunned, stars hustling for cover–gutsy Albuquerque ends up with the mic. She faces the audience and backed by a black Gospel group she belts out the anthem,

It don’t worry me, it don’t worry me. You may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.

Unsettling and puzzling. Seems a remark on self-occupied blinders or a unique kind of American nihilism, doesn’t it? And here is Albuquerque, stockings torn and hair dissheveled from being on the run, looking nothing like the ethereal Barbara Jean or her knockout rival in red. Would seem not at all a likely heir, but it’s she who gets the mic in a football-style fumble, faces the crowd and takes charge, revving quickly into this anthem with bold bravado.

It’s a salvation song, the chorus addressing the gods.

But everyone in the 70s was thinking of the 60s of course. Of the Kennedys and King in particular. Nashville captured people’s imaginations, seemed to make sense straight on but there was more to be had and that annoying more made the big seem-so assumptions seem too much assumption. One felt to catch what was really going on would be only out eye’s corner, in the way trickster spirits are glimpsed on the sly.

It don’t worry me, it don’t worry me. You may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.

In the novel I had always had Faith and Chance spend their first night at the Parthenon in Nashville (the book has been through several drafts with considerable changes each time as I fleshed out the story more). This had nothing to do with my own road trip to sort-of find the Great Penguin, though yes, a first stop was a visit to the pink Parthenon, a stop made only because of Altman’s Nashville. I didn’t spend the night there. It was an afternoon on a very Spring day, around this time of year. Sunny. Flowers were blooming while out west were brewing the blizzards we’d be driving into and chased by for most of the trip. My husband took a picture of me at the Parthenon. I was in my shades and jeans and a favorite orange amvet’s second hand store sweater that I’d picked up for a dollar, had already worn many years and it was on its last excursion. I was happy and smiling because I was at the Parthenon, standing on the sacred territory of that fuckin’ genius scene in which Barbara Jean was shot down and life’s-war-torn Albuquerque stepped forward with the chorus to address the gods.

It don’t worry me, it don’t worry me. You may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.

In the years ensuing the assassinations of the 60s and 70s, and Nashville, art and song paid a lot of attention to the psychology and shadow star role of the gun man, the captive slave and slayer of an ill and fading dream, but the new anthem is largely ignored or taken for granted, perhaps because it is so troublingly ambiguouus. Indeed, in Nashville the slayer was cloaked as an artist musician carrying around an instrument case. Nashville pays homage to a tradition of musical instruments changing into weapons, but of course there’s more to it, the movie taking place in Nashville and concerned with stars as well as a never-observed politician, whose face we never see and are jokingly told looks exactly like Connie White, Barbara Jean’s rival. His campaign vehicle rolls through the movie broadcasting his message, reminding of the pole-top speakers in MASH occasionally spitting and gurgling the messages of sky gods, directing action, commenting, offering presentiment.

The movie opens with one of Nashville’s stars singing the message of the invisible politician. Toward movie’s end, it is noted that n the park police control everything.

“I’m for doing some replacing,” is the politician’s message…

“I’ve discussed the Replacement Party…with people all over this country,and I’m often confronted with the statement, ‘I don’t want to get mixed up in politics,’ or ‘I’m tired of politics,’ or ‘I’m not interested.’ Almost as often someone says, ‘I can’t do anything about it anyway.’

“Let me point out two things. Number one: All of us are deeply involved with politics, whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. And number two: We can do something about it…,My mother’s people came by ship and fought at Bunker Hill. My daddy lost a leg in France, I have his medals still. My brother served with Patton. I saw action in Algiers. Oh, we must be doin’ somethin’right to last years. I pray my sons won’t go to war but if they must, they must. I share our country’s motto and in God I place my trust… I’ve lived through two depressions and seven dust bowl droughts. Floods, locusts and tornadoes, but I don’t have any doubts. We’re all part of history. Why, Old Glory waves to show how far we’ve come along till now, how far we’ve got to go…It’s up to us to pave the way…”

Yes, American Politics but more. People can one day be absolutely certain that what has occurred in their lives is a meant-to-be that’s set in stone with the rigidity of Delphic oracle, and the next day be confident again in free will and self determination. I’ve met few who don’t vacillate back and forth.

I was thinking of Altman when I wrote the Parthenon scene which ends the first chapter. By the end of the next to last draft, I had stripped down the scene to a bare fewparagraphs, and then in the final version I decided to include a reference to the anthem. I don’t mention Altman or his movie directly. The reference to the anthem is enough. There is no reason to mention the movie because the book has nothing to do with the movie but has everything to do with the song.

The mindset of the two nineteen year olds (Benjamin Moseley and Russell DeBusk Jr of Birmingham-Southern College)) and the twenty year old (Matthew Cloyd of the University of Alabama at Birmingham) who set fire to nine Baptist churches in Alabama, is going to be batted about for a while.

The New York times gives a brief glimpse of them and publishes a message that Cloyd posted to Moseley on the internet on January 9th.

“To my dearest friend Moseley:

“The nights have grown long and the interstates of Alabama drunk driverless, the state troopers bored, the county sheriffs less weary, and the deer of Bibb County fearless. 2006 is here, it is time to reconvene the season of evil! Only one problem stands in our way. I got a new cellphone for Christmas and I no longer have your number, so send it to me and evil shall once again come to pass!

“May our girlfriends be concerned about our safety, may our parents be clueless, may our beers be frosty, may our love lives be fruitful, may our weed be green as the freshly mowed grass!”

Apparently they rode around shooting deer from Cloyd’s SUV (owned by his mom) prior to setting fires, which Moseley is reported to have said was a joke that got out of control.

The first fires of February 3rd were set by the three, but Moseley and Cloyd were only involved in the later set of four fires, which were intended to be a diversion.

Somebody had some kind of something against Baptists, seems to me, if all nine churches were Baptist. Either that or in western Alabama that’s all there is are Baptist churches. There aren’t many people, I don’t believe, who go around committing serial arson as a joke. There may be a story there as to why at least one of them went after Baptist churches. Because it only takes one and two who don’t know how to say no. But not necessarily. Doesn’t have to be that easy a trackback. But there’s some story there.

Kind of an interesting psychology at work that would lead from riding around gunning down deer for pleasure, not for food, no reason but for killing…and then, hey, let’s burn down some churches! Glad they were stopped before an out-of-control joke went for human prey, or they graduated and went on to the corporate world.

The authorities took it for granted that whoever had set the fires was from rural Alabama and knew the back roads well. The kids didn’t match the profile but were quite familiar with those raods, which Cloyd’s missive indicates, that they’d been having fun for a while whooping it up outback, worrying their girlfriends.

I do wonder what their girlfriends will have to say about them. What kind of relationships these guys had with their girlfriends with this kind of lack of conscience and disregard for life.

There will, no doubt, be a made-for-television movie.

The spin will be different than if it wasn’t college kids. Because they’re college kids, the easy route may be pursued, people ready to accept it as a joke that got out of control, a more outrageous brand of boys will be boys will be college boys partying, oops, boy they got out of hand didn’t they. If they weren’t college kids they might be immediately painted as sinister. But being college kids from upper middle class homes, there will be people who opt for a story of partying boys who didn’t realize that matches and getting your ya-ya’s out don’t make a good mix. That joke gone wrong. Just a joke gone wrong.

Update:

The Birmingham news is stating it was a joke and that the individuals had set three of the first set of fires as they were “thrilled” with the sound of the fire engines responding to the first two blazes.

Brief rundowns are given of their personalities and achievements. Cloyd was the son of a physician and profile on his Facebook website is given as having references to “hunting, drinking and running from police”. DeBusk was a studious and funny theater major who “could settle disputes”. Moseley was charismatic, a student body president apparently for his high school who was voted funniest in class and homecoming king. He played guitar and sang for a college band.

And, again, at the end of the article, an investigator says the crime was a joke that got out of hand:

“After they lit the first two fires, it became spontaneous. Excitement, thrill was the motive,” Cavanaugh said.

That was Jim Cavanaugh speaking, regional director for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobbaco and Firearms and Explosives.

He also said, “I feel great for Alabama and I feel relieved for America.”

Birmingham News

Y’know I don’t see why three college kids burning down buildings because it was a great thrill, they liked the sirens, would conjure a feeling of relief for America.