FOR COMPLETIONISTS ONLY

Because it is Saturday, and because nobody reads this shit on Saturdays anyway, herewith, intended mainly for rabid Mango Pudding Blues completionists and for the appendices our biographers will one day compile, a complete track listing of the late 1980s cassette we mentioned the other day:

Side One:

The Rascals: Good Lovin’

The Rolling Stones: Get Off Of My Cloud

The Clash: Three Card Trick -This from the sad final whimper of an album by the band, a record mostly forgotten by history called Cut The Crap, made by only Joe Strummer and a bunch of young thugs. There was this song, though, and a fine bitter single called This Is England.

Fishbone: All Together Free

Run-DMC: Perfection

DOA: War -Vancouver punk band records inexplicably definitive cover of the Edwin Starr soul classic.

Katrina and the Waves: Mexico

Pete Townshend: Let My Love Open the Door

General Public: Tenderness -The 12” single!

Iggy Pop: Blah Blah Blah

AC/DC: Who Made Whom -Just kidding. It’s Who Made Who.

The Jesus And Mary Chain: The Hardest Walk

Bruce Cockburn: They Call it Democracy

Talk Talk: It’s My Life -A mostly instrumental remix.

Side Two

Crowded House: Now We’re Getting Somewhere

Crowded House: What It Means

Suicidal Tendencies: Institutionalized

The Police: Shadows in the Rain

UB40: I Got You, Babe

The rest of side two is blank. It never got finished. It was a Maxell XLII-S, 90-minute tape with a label on one side that said Beat Therapy and had a little drawing of a skull and crossbones on it. Apparently we needed therapeutic sounds after a slightly traumatic event that occurred back then. It involved a no-good female. We are, in retrospect, embarrassed about only one track, but it’s not the AC/DC song. The AC/DC number we stand by to this day. No, it’s the Bruce Cockburn. We enjoy many a Bruce Cockburn song, but we tend not to mention it much because he is so geekily earnest. So completely lacking any sort of post-modernism. We tell you this now only because, as we said, nobody reads us on Saturdays anyhow.

Note also that we do not credit re-mixers for the Talk Talk or the General Public track. In those days, remixes appeared on what were called 12” singles, which were so called to distinguish them from the smaller 7” singles which would contain only the standard radio mix of a song. Remixes rarely made a big deal out of who remixed them, because back in the 80s, before the mysterious ascension of the DJ, nobody cared. At all. Well, that’s not true. Those were the nascent days of remixing, and there were a few ‘name’ remixers like, say, Shep Pettibone or Jellybean Benitez. But those guys didn’t remix the General Public track we have here.

As a side note, we noticed the other day the Sean Puffy Combs or P-Diddly Combs or Sean-boy Daddy Mac Cockcomb or whatever his name currently is has a new record out called “We Invented The Remix”. Now, here at Mango Pudding Blues we have, of course, based an entire blogging career on the use of the royal we, so we are willing, albeit grudgingly, to accept that Puff Daddy is all alone on the album cover and referring to himself in the third person. Or maybe he’s referring to himself and his posse. Who knows? But what we do not accept is his claim that he or he and his merry men invented the remix, since we are pretty sure that there were plenty of remixes around when little Sean was still in short pants.

* * *

DOUGHNUT SALE

Late spring. 1973. I’m in grade three, let’s say. Word filters down to my young mind that there will be a doughnut sale after school. A fundraiser put on by the bigger kids. Doughnuts a nickel each. I have a nickel. The day is spent in reverie over the doughnut to come. But it takes me too long to make it to the centre of the school where the doughnuts are. I don’t remember why. They are taking down the hand-lettered signs that say “Doughnuts 5¢”. There is the unmistakable air of conclusion. Janitors sweeping, upending chairs on tables. Rolling things away. Girls in pairs walking toward exits. There are no more doughnuts.

I leave, nickel burning bright in my pocket. Walking home diagonally across the school field. On the dirt path kids beat into the lawn. Capitol Hill Elementary School. You can go look at it if you’re in Calgary, Alberta. It’s still there. Nineteenth Street and 22nd Avenue North West. And coming toward me on that diagonal path is an even littler kid than I, maybe a grade one kid. And he’s alone and he’s holding something small out in front of him with both hands and talking softly to himself and it’s a nickel and he’s saying “doughnut sale” over and over and over and he walks right past me and I don’t stop him. And then I stopped and turned and watched his tiny receding figure, walking to his doughnut doom, filled with hopes and dreams that were about to be dashed.

And I am standing there, maybe eight or nine years old, and I swear to god I could feel the electricity in my brain carving new neural pathways about excitement and loss and chance and the unknowableness of the fate that is not just in the future, but already there, there right now, just waiting for you around that corner or through that door. What you don’t know affects what you think you know in ways you don’t know. And I can feel time folding over like the sky is touching my brain and I already know that this is a dwell point in memory where the past will touch the future and that in a way I’ll always be standing there, eight or nine, watching him go.

* * *

UB40 CCCP

“This next one is an old Sixties number, uh, originally done by Sony and Cherski. It’s called I Got You, Babyvitch.”

Snippet of pre-song chatter from UB40’s Live in Moscow album, circa 1987, found on an ancient mixed cassette of ours that we dug out and listened to this morning. Also on the tape, Iggy Pop’s Blah Blah Blah and, much to our amusement, Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized. All he wanted was a Pepsi.

PONZI SCHEME

That’s a little two-word poem for you. Ponzi Scheme. Would have made a great name for an Italian Punk band. A chap named Carlo Ponzi did a bad thing in 1920 or so and then got that bad thing named after him, although this bad thing is now more commonly referred to as a Pyramid Scheme. The Ponzi Scheme came to mind while reading How I Realized The Internet Bubble Was A Pyramid Scheme, which came via the highly streamlined and always entertaining genius Biz Stone.

* * *

PRESCRIPTIONS

Our brother says it’s a barometric pressure thing, but offers as consolation the notion that the deepest artists are from the places of gloomiest pressures. So perhaps we will be better gamelan players than we thought. And from C in Calgary, a snatch of Pablo Neruda:

I happen to be tired of being a man
I happen to enter tailor shops and movie houses
withered, impenetrable, like a felt swan
navigating in a water of sources and ashes.

* * *

HIGH-PERFORMANCE SELF-LOATHING

Here at Mango Pudding Blues they’ve been putting in overtime in the self-loathing department. They have redoubled their efforts. They are rapidly delivering above-average quantities of self loathing. If you were here with us now and tried to look at something just past where we are standing, it would be distorted by the waves of high-grade self-loathing that are emanating from us.

* * *

TOM CRUISE

We here at Mango Pudding Blues are not at all supporters of Tom Cruise. Although we enjoyed Mr. Cruise in Magnolia, we wish to make it clear that we feel that was just a blip. Also, we are not fans of the vapid celebrity magazine profile. Nevertheless, we quote here now from a vapid celebrity profile of Mr. Cruise by Michael Cieply in the May 2002 issue of Esquire, which we read for reasons that are not entirely clear to us. Also not entirely clear to us are the reasons why this quote has been bouncing around in our mind since we first read it several weeks ago.

“Problems, he says now, are often caused by the presence of some person ‘who’s off point, who really wants to be doing something else.’”

* * *

ESPRESSO LOVE

I used to drink, every morning, a large-size stovetop espresso maker full of espresso. And then I would light out, expansive, expressive, elastic; filled with delusions of grandeur, sucking in huge breaths and determined to crush the day. To force the day to submit to my indomitable will. To herd the day and its family into internment camps. To blast a tunnel through the day and build a railroad. To divide the day into parts and turn them against each other. To leap down off my horse onto the day and hog-tie its legs. I would walk down Fourth Street in good ol’ Calgary, Alberta, skin crawling deliciously as my entire central nervous system tightened up and twanged like a rockabilly guitar string stretched against my bones of injection-molded titanium from the future. I drank this every morning. About a mug and a half of ultramega super-duper high-performance joe. Yes.

Well, when I was moving out here I tossed the espresso maker. It was well-worn. No, wait, maybe I gave it away. I got rid of so much stuff, it’s hard to remember. I was all zen and shit, divesting myself of garbage bags filled with clothes, boxes of books, entire suites of dusty cat-scratched furniture. Plates. Plants. Pets. The espresso maker didn’t make the cut. Killer had a coffee machine, and coffee was a nice thing for two. Polite. The aluminum espresso maker was more like drug works, you know? A private thing. A thing best left behind. When it was the two of us we’d drink coffee. And breaking that espresso habit was maybe good, I thought. Who drinks that much caffeine? And probably the constant low-dose aluminum exposure from the crappy Italian casting was giving me Alzheimer’s. So.

Then, last November, Killer and I were talking about what we might buy ourselves for Christmas. Fancy electric espresso machine was a contender on her list. You know; a Starbucks yuppie style thing. We didn’t get one, on the strength of my argument that, like juicers and ice-cream makers, they’re too labour-intensive and inevitably end up in the yuppie cupboard, way behind the stack of serving plates, collecting dust and guilt. But we couldn’t really say no when we found one at the Great Glebe Garage sale last weekend (wherein this whole tony neighbourhood here has an utterly Norman Rockwell garage sale every May, with running kids and neighbours swapping stories and barbecues fired up and so on) from this bearded russian dude for five bucks. Five bucks! And so this morning early, before she got up, I cleaned the thing up and plugged it in and tenderly, tentatively, made myself a little son of a bitch of a latte. And man, was it good. And I made another. And another when she got up, one for each of us. And another this afternoon when I thought perhaps I was losing a little snap. And another after my late afternoon nap. And now I want another.

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