| |
Friday, January 17, 2003
STOLEN
We keep meaning to mention to you that our collection of Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros discs (amount: 2) were stolen from the car of a friend just a week or so before he died. Joe died, not the friend. We had loaned him those discs, along with an early Lee Perry, a Trojan records sampler and a Lee Perry/Bob Marley compilation, and he was planning to return them to us. While we drank a beer and ate a cheeseburger, his window was smashed in one block away and the thieves took the whole bunch.
The newer of the two Joe albums was pretty great, too.
We also liked a few choice moments on the first Joe Strummer solo album, way back in the 80s, which we also used to have on cd, but which drifted down the cd river some time ago, as these things do. You can’t keep them all. You just can’t.
And we even used to have, on vinyl 12” long-playing record, the soundtrack to Walker, which should prove our devotion to Joe Strummer right there. And a cd single from Trash City, another soundtrack cut. And so on.
Losing the reggae cds was a blow too. We listen to a lot of the early Trojan records now, and early Lee Perry productions (which we prefer over the mid- and late- period of his), and early Bob Marley, when the influence of doo-wop and blues and r&b and gospel were so strong, and the sound so raw. And we think about something we read a few months ago, in which a member of Marley’s old entourage said that he, Marley, had written the vast majority of the songs that he is known for by the age of 23 or so. Which boggles the mind.
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
RANDOM HOUSEKEEPING NOTES
a) Our new MPB 3.0 back end features a referer log, which is nice, although so far nobody seems to be referring to us. If you are so kind as to have a link to our page on your page and you have not updated it to reflect our new address, could you please do so? And if you don’t have a link to our page, why don’t you put one up now? We need all the help we can get.
b) We went through all the trouble of setting up a brand new mailbox for all of you, and nobody seems to be using it. Every day we look hopefully in the slot, and every day we can see right through to the other side.
c) ...and the next week we did it all again, and this time the cup didn’t leak, and the results came back highly positive. The donation and basting took place as scheduled, but didn’t take, and the whole project evaporated after that, much to my lawyer’s relief.
d) We are no longer sure where we got the notion that there would be a new Neal Stephenson novel this year, but we hope we are right. We have also just heard that there will be a new Jonathan Lethem this year, and we are happy about that.
e) Chez Piggy’s wasn’t as “designed” as we thought it would be. It didn’t look in any way like a serious hipster joint, nor like a self-consciously hippie-esque joint. It looked very unassuming and unpretentious. Two levels in an old stone building with unfinished walls and huge skylights, but with dreadful furniture and ghastly carpets. We were puzzled but somehow relieved by this. Pan Chancho, which has a little eating area in the back, was much more stylish, in a colorful and inviting kinda way.
f) We have been foisting this recipe on everyone else, so you might as well have it too; it’s from the local liquor store. You boil 5 oz wine with a star anise. Pour 1 oz vodka over a slice each of orange and lemon in a heat-friendly glass. Add the hot wine. Top with 1 oz canadian whiskey. Voila. Sort of a hot sangria. Easy, though. These are potent.
g) ...loading up the five-cd cd player with a few new things we got from the library, including the latest record by Leon Redbone and that new Bob Dylan album, Love and Theft. And then we wondered if we would be able to tell the difference between them.
Get it?
Oh, never mind.
H) General response so far to the new Mango Pudding Blues has been highly positive, although one reader misses the picture of the mango and another yearns for the days when we were less stylish and more substantial. Hmmm. Well, thank you all for your kind words and encouragement. Keep reading. Spread the word. That is all.
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
SPERM COUNT
Ah, right. The sperm count. Yes.
This was years ago, perhaps 1992 or so; I had been called upon to father a lesbian turkey-baster baby and so I thought I better get my boys checked to make sure they could swim. The mother-to-be was being flown in from another city, and the preparations involved complications. How inconvenient it would be if I’d been shooting blanks unbeknownst all those years.
Flown in? Yes. I’d like to tell you my genetic material was worth travelling for. My elegant bone structure. My superior intellect. No. It was that nobody else in the country would donate non-anonymously. Mom wanted to point our spawn to me when he or she finally asked who pappy was. My lawyer advised against it, but I was game.
My doctor, young and hip and gay himself, was all for the lesbian turkey-baster baby. He nodded thoughtfully when I told him I needed a sperm count and a full battery of tests for anything unfortunate a bodily fluid might carry. “Yup,” he said, “We’ll give you all the usual STD tests plus hepatitis, I guess.”
At the lab, I thought I would be handed a dirty magazine and a cup by a big hairy humorless nurse in a little room, but no. The lab had rules. The lab had a schedule.
“You will collect the sample at home and then bring it in,” the big hairy humorless nurse said. “We only analyze these samples on Wednesday mornings, and you must deliver the sample within one hour of collection, and you must keep the sample as near to your body temperature as possible.”
Thock! She slapped the the sealed sterilized sample cup on the desk. Plastic. Like a pill bottle, but 25 per cent bigger.
Well, I had a 9:00 class on Wednesday mornings. Journalism school. An exam that particular coming Wednesday morning, so I couldn’t skip. The lab opened at 8:30, but I figured if I um, collected the uh, sample at, say, 8:00, hopped on the train and got there by 8:30, I would have just enough time to make it to school.
So. That morning, at precisely 8:00, I got busy. I got down. I was humming Gershwin’s Nice Work If You Can Get It.
Except have you ever produced a semen sample because you had to? Ever produce a semen sample with one eye on your watch? Ever produce a semen sample while thinking about how small the opening of the sample bottle is? It is not nice work. When it comes to producing semen samples, I found out that morning that I am an old-school romantic. I am not all business. I like a little foreplay, you know?
So it took a little longer than expected. I was hurried. I was harried. I produced, eventually, after a lengthy struggle, a pathetic droplet, most of which I got on the lid and the outside of the cup.
Also, it was freezing cold out that day, so I was worried about keeping it warm. I put it in my shirt pocket, close to my heart, and wrapped myself up in my jacket. I kept my arms crossed to cradle the sample jar in the warmth of my chest while I waited for the train. And I made it. Just.
And when I opened my jacket to let in the warm air of the medical lab as I walked purposefully up to the desk of the big hairy humorless nurse to Thock! down my sample, I felt it; the cold cold unmistakable feeling of wet cloth on my chest.
My sample cup had leaked. My pathetic droplet sample had somehow wicked out to make a saucer-sized wet spot on my shirt, which I had to wear to school all day.
And I had to do it all again a week later.
Monday, January 13, 2003
TOP TEN
Our old pal the Gaijin was looking for our top ten movies and records for 2002. Jesus, we couldn’t even come up with ten total newly issued records that we listened to in 2002. “Well,” we thought, “we’ll just give him a top five.” But we couldn’t, in the end, even think of five 2002 records that we could honestly endorse. Oh sure, we listened to music around the clock here at Mango Pudding Blues, and much of it was new to us. But it wasn’t new new. We listened to Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and Handel’s Messiah and Philip Glass’ Powaquaatsi and Shuggie Otis and Django Reinhardt and the mighty Ethiopians, all released years, decades ago. And movies? We barely set foot in the cinemas this year. And when we did, we rarely left without disappointment.
We would like to believe that this is because we are wiser now, that our top ten moments were not supplied by Hollywood or by the major record companies, but that they were moments of reality, when we were creating our own music with our Gamelan group or living the little movie of our life, drifting through central park in the rain, perhaps, or riding the rickety wooden roller coaster at La Ronde in Montreal, or cooking a great meal of thai red curry shrimp. Moments laughing and in love and looking like a million dollars with a tan and a big wristwatch and our growing paunch. But in fact, we suspect it has nothing to do with wisdom. It has to do with us just getting old and detaching completely from the culture of the moment. We are now what we once raged against, the cranky thirty-something man who not only doesn’t know what time it is, but doesn’t even think it’s important to know. The mist has descended for us, and we can no longer make out the edges of the shifting continents of pop culture as we used to. Is Pink cool? Are the Strokes for real? Are there still raves? Is punk dead yet? Did Nelly really cut himself? We have no idea.
And so, the best we can do is a top two, in the following categories:
Records:
1) Maitreya, the Future Buddha by David Parsons. Trancey new age electronic noodling and chanting taken to depths that render it fundamentally unlistenable to most sensible people. But we like it anyway.
2) Il Sospiro by Rabih Abou-Khalil. We’ve previously mentioned this one, in which the ayatollah of the oud plays a soulful, quietly dazzling solo tour de force.
Movies:
1) Devdas: Visually, musically, dramatically just saturated. You could not cram more movie in. Shocking.
2) Frida: We had only a lukewarm interest initially, and the thing is not perfect, but this is one of those films that we just keep turning over and over in our mind. Plus it taught us a lot.
Books
1) This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of the Talking Heads in the 20th Century, by David Bowman. Well, the paperback came out this year, so I’m counting it. Loved the writing; so fast, so lean but so warm.
2) Fireland by Joshua Allen. Okay, not a book, a website. But far more engaging, literary, interesting and daring than many of the printed books I read this year. Along with F-Train, Fireland is inventing something new in literature.
In closing, to go back to music, we would finally like to get off of our chest the fact that we do not like the Thievery Corporation. We hear the Thievery Corporation frequently as we wait in boutiques for Killer to finish trying on trousers, and we’re always impressed with its shiny audio surfaces, but on further investigation always find there is nothing else there. Nothing. And we feel this might be true of a great deal of the new electronica.
Sunday, January 12, 2003
LUST FOR LIFE
1) It has been said by rock ’n’ roll scholars that two rock bands are named after the average volume of ejaculate produced by a healthy adult male; 10cc, the seventies British outfit best known for the hit “I’m Not In Love”, and sixties folk-rock group The Lovin’ Spoonful. We at Mango Pudding Blues can’t say for sure if a) either name was truly chosen for that reason, or b) if the 10cc measurement is correct. Although we are regular users of (fans of, even) the metric system, the cubic centilitre just doesn’t come up around here. We measure all small volume amounts with imperial tablespoons and teaspoons. Not just in the Mango Pudding Blues kitchen, but in kitchens all over Canada.
1.2) We imagine that the cubic centilitre is the amount of volume that could be placed into a cube that is one centimetre on each side. Metric tends to make sense like that. And, incidentally, we believe that the weight (or, to be precise, the mass) of a cubic centilitre of water is the basis of the gram. The idea was to link all measurements to the metre, you see?
1.3) As a perhaps overly personal aside, our own average ejaculate volume at Mango Pudding Blues is significantly lower than the average, but we make up for the volume with an almost superhuman sperm count, an unusually high sperm motility, and a sperm lifespan so long that it raised our doctor’s eyebrows. Maybe one day we’ll tell you about the time we got our sperm tested.
2) Some Lovin’ Spoonful songs? Do You Believe in Magic. Summer In The City. Did You Ever Have to Make Up your Mind. The Spoonful was fronted by John Sebastian, who was best known to people of our vintage as the singer and, we think, composer of the lilting theme to the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter.
3) The original guitarist for the Spoonful was Zal Yanovsky. It has been said that he played as well as some of the big British rock guitar gods, but without the pretension or the ego.
4) And the story, perhaps apocryphal, goes that Yanovsky cut a deal with the law to avoid drug charges by ratting out his dealer, which brought counterculture shame and an untimely end to the Spoonful.
5) Yanovsky eventually returned to his native Canada and gave up rock ’n’ roll for his other passion, food. With his wife, he bought a ramshackle old livery stable in downtown Kingston, Ontario (pop. 100,000) and turned it into a cool little restaurant, Chez Piggy and, later, opened an artesian bakery a block away called Pan Chancho. Kingston is a lovely little town on the water of Lake Ontario, and by all accounts, Yanovsky loved his life there. Those who knew him (and apparently everybody knew him) say that he had an irrepressible joie de vivre. That he was one of those men who are just enormous, radiating massive blasts of love and life and joy and sweetness. We at Mango Pudding Blues first read about Yanovsky in an article in the paper a couple of years ago that had a picture of him, hugely bearded, holding an electric guitar and projecting a woozy hippie lust for life in front of a rack of beautiful loaves of bread. He was written up because The Lovin’ Spoonful was reuniting for their induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. We were impressed with him, because irrepressible joie de vivre is our favorite thing.
6) Yanovsky died last month, too young at 58, on his farm outside of Kingston, of a heart attack.
7) And so finally today we took the Killer on a little road trip to Kingston for a tasty rustic brunch of chorizo and Spanish eggs and black beans and potatoes at Chez Piggy, and afterward we bought a loaf of bread and some tapenade at Pan Chancho, and it’s the best tapenade we’ve ever eaten.
|
|
