MY HOLY BIBLES


Bibles? Bibles? Oh, yeah, I’ve got two of ’em, really. Brian Eno’s A Year (With Swollen Appendices), which is a lesson by example of the pleasures of thinking. The other is Up The Organization by Robert Townsend. It’s a business book from 1970 that in one bright flash rendered redundant every one that came after it. Crisp, tough and showering sparks, the book blazes a clear and honest path to corporate victory that applies to anything else in life, and it does it with incisive prose that’s stripped clean, intense and humming with power. Short, sharp and shocking, it’s the Iggy Pop to Tom Peters’ David Bowie, and I’ve read it about 200 times. Shit! Available in used bookstores for a buck or libraries for free.

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WHEEEEEE!

1) I am right now reading the hell outta Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. Go look at an excerpt.

2) A small bit of advice from my friend the world-famous artist: “I find if you add enough hot sauce to a soup you can see into the future.”

3) If you really had to buy a mini-van but were appalled by the blow to your coolness, you could get a Fuct Cube. I just read about that at the new improved Gaijinworld.

4) I am today wearing an F-Train t-shirt. It’s an overpriced New York City souvenir displaying the orange circle with a white F such as one would see on the subway. For some reason I just love these shirts. This morning this one reminded me of how much I like F-train, the website.

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HOBBIES

A man must have his hobbies, and at Mango Pudding Blues we have several. Here are two of them:

1) Comparing the weather here in Ottawa with that in Calgary, where we came from and where some of our friends and family still live. When the weather here is better, we smugly laugh with feelings of high superiority. When it’s worse, we gnash our teeth and vow to get even.

2) Slaying our long-suffering girlfriend Killer with our spot-on impression of Derek Jacobi’s Cl-cl-cl-Claudius from I, Claudius.

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ROCK ’N’ ROLL!

Longtime readers know that we at Mango Pudding Blues sometimes get our kicks by watching a half hour or so of rock videos on television so that we can roll our eyes, shake our head, cluck our tongue and otherwise express our wonder over what this world is comin’ to. As a curmudgeonly old-school rock fan who pretty much fell off the bus around the beginning of electronica, we are frequently enraged, amazed, appalled or befuddled by what passes these days for popular musical entertainment.

In the befuddled department, take Canadian rock quartet Sloan. Although we were never fans of Sloan, we were led to believe that the band started out as a pretty snappy little power-pop combo. We were given to understand that Sloan was deserving of our respect. We got a chuckle when we noticed, over the years, Sloan’s aesthetic increasingly leaning towards a tongue-in-cheek Seventies stoner look. But we were completely confused by the new video, Keep On Doin’ It or Just Keep Doin’ It or Sure Feels Good To Do It or Feel It Do It or something like that, in which the band has honed its entire shtick to achieve an almost eerily complete Trooperness. A sheer Trooperocity. An unbelievable Trooperishness.

What does it mean? Are they eviscerating that kind of bland, meathead hockey-shirt Canadian rock with a rapier so fine and fast that we at Mango Pudding Blues can no longer detect it? Or have they become consumed by the very thing they once toyed with, the way the Cult, in our day, went from cool goth-punks to AC/DC almost overnight? Is Sloan cool? Is Sloan for real? What the hell?

We are a little concerned that we have become so old, so out-of-touch, so Dad-like that we really, truly cannot tell if this video is meant to be a joke or not.

PS: In preparing this piece, we hadda go find a Trooper website to link to for readers who may not be familiar with the band. Lucky readers. We want you to know that we were very disturbed by what we found, but we feel it fully supports our Trooper/Sloan analogy.

PPS: Actually, rock in general is beginning to disturb us. The sight of hairy, sweaty young men with guitars and microphones no longer thrills us as it once did. We are, in fact, actually worried about posting this item, in case it dissuades our more elegant readers from carrying on with us. We would like to assure them that Mango Pudding Blues is still devoted to jazz, classical and bluegrass music.

PPPS: Mango Pudding Blues is anti-Shakira, but pro-Pink. Mango Pudding Blues can simply not get enough of that video with Pink going to a party in Run Lola Run fast-mo.

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ADVICE TO READERS

This would be a good time to give yourself a break. This would be a good time to think about how far you’ve come. This would be a good time to drift for a few days without feeling guilty about it. This would be a good time to realize that your slumps are always temporary, and that you will soon begin to rule the world again. This would be a good time to get some rest and drink lots of water. This would be a good time to look up anaphora in the dictionary.

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PFUI!

The Cube? That was cool. The titanium Power Book? That was super cool. The iPod? Unquestionably cool. Even the little white iBooks are pretty cool. The new iMac, however, is not cool. With its chromed neck and its white plastic base and its gawky proportions, it looks kinda junky. Tacky like a cheap toy.

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CALGARY, ALBERTA, VANISHES

Did I miss the news item about the destruction of Calgary, Alberta? The reason I ask is that NONE OF MY FUCKING SO-CALLED FRIENDS FROM THERE HAVE E-MAILED ME IN AGES!

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A MAN WITH A PLAN
Here at Mango Pudding Blues, we’re glad that Michael Barrish didn’t stick to his original plan and “drop out of school and write poetry for as long as I could and then fucking kill myself.”

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