Friday Jukebox: Goodbye, goodbye edition

And this was from 2008, mind, when we THOUGHT things were bad.

Friday Jukebox: Take it to the GW Bridge and stop

So I just found out that:

1) New Jersey is the only U.S. state without an official song.

2) Unlike our fine Oregon, my Oregon.

"Land of the Empire Builders, Land of the Golden West;
Conquered and held by free men, Fairest and the best.
Onward and upward ever, Forward and on, and on;
Hail to thee Land of Heroes, My Oregon.

Land of the rose and sunshine, Land of the summer’s breeze;
Laden with health and vigor, Fresh from the western seas.
Blest by the blood of martyrs, Land of the setting sun;
Hail to thee, Land of Promise, My Oregon"

Oregon, fuck yeah!

Sorry. Okay, back to Jersey.  

3) Apparently the last candidate was something called I'm From New Jersey by John Gorka, which is this thing:

I love this so hard. For one thing, how can you NOT love a "state song" that tells you about the actual, no-bullshit, way things are in the state it's about:

I'm from New Jersey
I don't expect too much
If the world ended today
I would adjust

 

I'm from New Jersey
No, I don't talk that way
I watched too much TV
When I was young

 

I'm from New Jersey
My mom's Italian
I've read those mafia books
We don't belong

 

There are girls from New Jersey
Who have that great big hair
They're found in shopping malls
I will take you there

 

I'm from New Jersey
It's not like Texas
There is no mystery
I can't pretend

 

I'm from New Jersey
It's like Ohio
But even more so
Imagine that

4) But. I see another contender for the Jersey crown; John Pizzarelli's I Like Jersey Best:

Which also goes hard in on the awesome lyrics:

"Lots of dineries, oil refineries,
Our highways make you cough,
But Spring Lake Heights and Belmar
Are places to get off.
Drinking spots and used car lots
Make the place just grand,
If you want to pay a visit,
Newark Airport's where you land."

So...such a choice!

Whaddya think? Deeply ironic and cynical, or just out-and-out funny? I mean...if you're gonna sing a song about your state, which way to go?

Hazy Shade of Winter

It was just less than a month ago that I posted pictures of the autumn drama at the Portland Japanese Garden.

Writing shit about new snow
For the rich
Is not art.
 ~ Robert Hass (supposedly a translation from 小林 一茶 (Kobayashi Issa)

As Kobayashi-san says; that shit's done with.

The weather has made a hard turn to winter. Mind you, it's winter in the Northwest, which means one of two things.

Typically it's an endless gray drizzle spiced with days of genuine hard rain. Low temperature 42, high temperature 44, rinse, repeat. That's the "west-wind winter".

Then every couple of weeks the polar high looms down over the intermediate space between the Cascades and the Rockies, over the high desert, and the east wind blows the clouds away and the cold in.

That's when you get mornings of freezing fog, and bright, chill afternoons that never let old bones warm, and my bones - those of which that aren't titanium aftermarket parts - feel very, very old on those sorts of days.

They're also not beloved of Portlanders, creatures of the Mediterranean that we are. So the Garden was quiet and I enjoyed the change from red and gold to spare black branches. 

Or bare red ones, as on the red-twig dogwood...

I should note that True Portland dies hard in the winter; this young woman attending the annual "Crafty Wonderland" fair refused to let the biting weather nip her toes back into closed shoes:

That's not actually an uncommon sight here (I'm pretty sure I've blogged about it somewhere but am too lazy to look...), the combination of a heavy sweater or jacket above some chilly pink toes below. 

Part of it may be hardiness, part of it may be unwillingness to surrender to the season. Part of it may be the simple ease of slipping into sandals rather than wrestling with heavy socks and shoes.

Whatever the reason, it's a thing, and a Portland thing, at that.

Speaking of Crafty Wonderland, several Portlanders took advantage of the seasonal surroundings to let some pretty serious Xmass-y freak flags fly.

One such was this gal; I couldn't get a great shot of her outfit but this gives you the idea - the entire front of her dress was an solid mass of Christmas-tree bling, like the gold-encrustation on Smaug's belly:

Plus glittery silver snowflakes in her hair. 

The effect was completely insane in a sort of holly-jolly way. The Nikes make it sort of Ugly-Christmas-sweater-casual. Fun look, but I sure couldn't pull it off. There's something to being cute and /or pretty that helps make "okay, that's freaky" into "awww...that's cute".

But the award for Most High-level Holiday Cosplay goes to the Elf Off The Shelf:

I don't want to show her face, so you miss the Santa-hat topping, but given the rest of the outfit you get the idea.

My favorite bit is from the hem to the floor; you got your saucy fishnets going for the whole "Santa Baby" frisky sex-under-the-Christmas-tree thing, but then you've got the massive engineer boots that add a touch of "...but-fucking-try-it-and-I'll-kick-your-fucking-ass" danger. 

Clearly this is someone who has the authority to get you on the Naughty List.

That's all for now.

This little post has been too much fun to load up with serious business, so I'll close with Christmas standard you know (It's the "Piano Guys" doing the Vince Guaraldi Peanuts tunes, and since Blogger is being a dick about letting me embed it, here's the link to copy and paste - https://youtu.be/tyPDQpel8bI and a finger to you, Blogger, for being dickish about this). 

But I will be back later in the weekend to discuss some of the nonsense that we're getting up to here in the Land of the East Wind Cold.

Back in a bit.

Mamma Mia!

At the end of a very long day - which involved driving some 150 miles and spending the day pestering people playing with dirt - it was "sing-along night" at my daughter's high school production of Mamma Mia!

Surely you at least know that this ABBA-fueled jukebox musical is a thing, right?

Well, the kiddo's school theater group has been staging it all this past week, and mileage be damned, last night is was my parental duty to go see it.

I've confessed my love for the art form in general, but this particular example is...well...not one of my favorites.

I'm not a huge ABBA fan, for one. Which isn't to say that I don't and can't enjoy bop-along silly helium dance pop - the reaction that Scissor Sisters I Don't Feel Like Dancing provokes in me is embarrassing in it's total lack of decorum -  but outside of the title song I've always been pretty immune to the charm of the Swedish quartet.

And the book is frankly idiotic beyond the "usual idiotic" level of musical books.

But being a good parent I dragged my filthy ass into the big theater to see what the Girl and her dramat pals had come up with.

And came away pleasantly surprised.

It was a damn good production, for one thing, especially held up against my memories of wooden high school versions of Oklahoma! and Bye Bye Birdie and the other typical school-musical chestnuts. The set, sound, and lighting were damn near professional-grade, the choreography and blocking were smooth and both integral to and advanced the plot (such as it is - it's still a deeply stupid book...).

The ABBA songs weren't nearly as irritating as I remembered, except for the second-opening number; having the daugher Sophie sing Honey, Honey to her absent dad? Ummm....creepy much? Yyyokay.

The piece that made it really not just tolerable but enjoyable, though, were the two female leads; Lily Russell as Donna, the mother, and Rosa Workman as Sophie, the daughter.

They were both solid actors doing good work in their parts. But what their performances really reminded me was of the difficulty that an actor in musical theater has that they don't share with either their straight-theater or concert/gig singer counterparts.

A musical actor has to act with their singing voice.

That's goddamn hard. That's what makes the art so much fun for people like me who enjoy it; seeing people who are good at that difficult skill execute it well, and Lily and Rosa did that last night. They made their otherwise-ridiculous characters into real people for two hours on the stage, and invested you in them by the power of their singing voices.

Obviously opera presents the same challenge, but there you have the help of having your songs written by people like Verdi or Mozart or Wagner and not Björn fucking Ulvaeus.

(And that's why, incidentally, I have such contempt for the current slew of "singing shows" like The Voice and American Idol; they force the idea of singing into a power-pop ballad mold to the point where many listeners assume that "good singing" is "belting a ballad at the top of your emotional range".

Well, Mamma Mia! does have one of those - Donna gets the star turn with The Winner Takes It All - and Russell belted it nicely and got the expected roof-raising ovation.

One thing I should add here; the Girl herself.

She’s a musical fan and totally gets how lame a jukebox musical like MM is (we both love good productions like Wicked or Sweeney Todd) so she’d been positively cackling with schadenfreude at leaning on the whole “support the kid’s efforts” parental guilt to make us sit thru it. It’s actually worse for my Bride because she loathes the whole musical genre, good, bad, or indifferent.

But she's also a kiddo so, like all kiddos, wants loving attention and approval for her efforts.

So we went, and, surprise, it was fun, and the Girl danced in the aisles during the encores, and everyone went home happily humming "Waterloo".

And if there's no better purpose for the silly thing?

The Mamma Mia! did just what it was supposed to do.

Friday Jukebox: Christmas Eve Edition

Seeing as how I've exposed myself as a latte-sippin' effete lover of musical theatre, today's jukebox includes a couple of songs I love from a couple of musicals I adore.

The first is from Anais Mitchell's Hadestown, a darkly gorgeous retelling of the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice reimagined as a modern parable of love, death, fate and power.

At this moment Eurydice is facing a choice; struggle and hunger with her beloved, or a life of surety in Hadestown. The Fates ask her what she's going to do:

Wonderful song in a wonderful show that, if you're familiar with the story doesn't end...well.

The other is sung by this gal:

She's Anne of Cleves, the fourth of the "Six Wives of Henry VIII", and is currently part of the cast of the musical Six, about, well...go figure.

All the ex-wives are fun (for the purest entertainment you might give Anne Boleyn's "Don't Lose Your Head" a listen...) but Anne is the Queen of the Castle (woof!) as you might expect from the one woman who came off her head-on-collision with Hank the Eighth the better off for it.

So this Christmas Eve we can join her "Doin' my thing in my palace in Richmond!"

And as a weird example of the way my mind works, enjoying Six the musical took me from there to thinking about all of the ex-wives and their ex, and from there to the peculiar tale of the infamous jousting accident of 1536, which will be the subject of my next serious post.

But between now and then I'll be back with some Christmas crap.

Friday Jukebox: Warning Signs Edition

 Fun rockabilly number for a sunny Friday afternoon.

Enjoy.

Friday Jukebox: Journey to the West Side of the Palace Edition

 I've got some fairly rough thoughts to put down about this coming Tuesday...but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I've had a lovely couple of days off this past Thursday and Friday, and I wanted to post something fun and lighthearted, so, this.

This is another one of those "anime music videos", or AMVs, and I love this one because the creator - "Sarah the Boring" - is anything but.

First, she took two wildly different anime and mashed them up into a "Prince and the Pauper" story, but which totally works, because of how similar two of the characters look.

Both are tall and skinny with long reddish hair. But that's where the similarity ends.

The scruffy looking pauper guy is from 幻想魔伝 最遊記, Gensōmaden Saiyūki, the anime version of the old, old story Journey to the West. He's Sha Gojyo (沙悟浄) and is some sort of weird human-demon hybrid. He's the Bad Boy in classic anime tradition:

The Prince is 桐生 冬芽, Kiryū Tōga...

...one of the characters from Revolutionary Girl Utena - 少女革命ウテナ Shōjo Kakumei Utena. This anime is described as "...follow(ing) Utena Tenjou, a teenage girl who expresses her desire to be a prince through her strong-willed personality and tomboyish manner of dress." 

Apparently there are sword duels - I've only seen bits and pieces of it.

Anyway, everything about this little AMV is perfect; the editing, the lip-synching, the mismatched-but-matching characters, and most especially the ridiculously goofy, poppy, hooky song "King of Spain" by some sort of Canadian novelty group call Moxy Früvous.

So for your Friday entertainment; "The Prince and the Kappa" - you'll have to follow the link to YouTube; unfortunately the creator won't let me embed it. But do, please; it's a fun Friday entertainment!

 

Back tomorrow with more serious content.

 

 

 

Friday Jukebox: アニメミュージック・ビデオ Edition

I was going to write a post about how I and my nefarious antifa terrorist friends have been lighting off fires in the Oregon forests, but, y'know what? Fuck that. It's been a shitty week, and I wanted to post something fun.

So...these are something called "anime music videos"; they're fan-made, and take clips from anime - that is, Japanese animated films, and set them to music. I stumbled across them reading Athena Scalzi's fun little post on the subject over at Whatever.

Here's the first one. The bulk of the anime is an utterly adorable little slice of life series called Tamako Market, たまこまーけっと , which is, well, adorable.

Couple of notes: the bit at the very end - which is definitely NOT from the rest of the anime, is from another show, Kyousougiga (京騒戯画)

And now I reeeelly want to find the episode of Tamako Market that's sampled at about 2:12 in the video, because I want to find out about the hammer and three nails. WTF? Crucifixion? In an adorable slice-of-life show? Seriously?

The music - which is a huge part of what makes it art - is a song titled "Crabbuckit" performed by the Good Lovelies. Big props to Tamako, the Good Lovelies, and to Copycat Revolver, who made it.

And the second is here:

This one is a lot more complex, and includes the following anime: Your Lie In April, Virgin Soul, Magi and the labyrinth of magic, Beyond the Boundary, Yuri On Ice, Death Parade, and Free!!!

I don't know why I like this one so much, but I think it's the combination of the utterly goofy pop song ("Dance Monkey", by Tones and I) and the clever editing by Light Raider, the creator. 

Anyway, that's for Friday. 

I'll be back this weekend with my take on these damn fires.

Friday Jukebox: Life Ain't Fair Edition

"Welcome home, my child
Your home is a checkpoint now
Your home is a border town
Welcome to the brawl
Life ain't fair, my child
Put your hands in the air, my child
Slowly now, single file, now
Up against the wall."

I hope you and yours are safe and well and hopeful.

For sometimes hope is all we have.

Friday Jukebox: A Song About Death

Since we've been all "Plague Year"...here's Say My Name from the Broadway production of "Beetlejuice".

Missy has developed a taste for the musical theater through her middle school drama program and - to Mojo's absolute horror - has reawakened my affection for the art form.

And, hey...what could be more appropriate for a Friday Jukebox in The Plague Year than a demon from hell selling a suicidal teen on the idea of haunting her own father with the end of becoming an earthly power through taking possession of the human victims?

Plus, fuck; it's a really catchy song (which, if you enjoy, go find "No Reason"; that's a REAL hoot...)

Anyway, this is my first Friday Jukebox in a while. I gotta think of some more tunes I enjoy for the next.

Friday Jukebox: Tangerine Toddler Jive Turkey Edition

What a fucking week this has been, eh?

So in honor of His Fraudulency's first week full of hysterical meltdowns and brutal, Obama-like executive-order tyranny, and general I'm-a-bigly-huge-assholishness, here's the Ohio Players with his new theme song.

Friday Jukebox: Carols for a Secular Sort of Saint Nicholas Day

Although the rest of the outfit got the day off I'm working today, so I have a computer to hand and, hence, you have this.

It is no secret that I am Hell-bound, and my "holiday music" tastes run to my unchurched bent. I enjoyed this simply because it's clever and melodic and still retains some vestigium of the "season".

Sadly, for me the season is colored by the grim anticipation of what is to come in the New Year; the ankommen an Macht of the Old Regime, the Return of the Oligarchs and their new dauphin, the Vulgar Aristocrat, the resurgence of the plutocratic, punitive Bourbons that I had thought were scourged for good from our politics in 1932.

And because this was a self-inflicted wound I cannot echo Ebenezer's nephew in his optimistic blessing of the holiday for what it symbolizes in human nature: (h/t to Pierce:)

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

It seems to me more likely that this season belongs to a country, my country, that now belongs to a powerful minority that is trying to force it, and us, to shut its and our hearts to the least and lowest of our own, and I dread and fear what may happen if, and when, the sort of America that my grandparents knew, the America of the Gilded Age, the America that preceded the New Deal, is forced back upon us.

I am not by nature a happy man. That requires a belief in the justice of the world and the goodness of others and I have seen too much injustice to believe in the antithesis and I have little, if any, trust the goodness of humankind.

Still I try and look for happiness and hope. But more and more, on these, the longest nights of the year, I am drawn back to the old spare, sorrowful songs from the times we huddled against the cold and the dark unsure of whether the warmth and the light would ever return.

O sisters, too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day;
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
By-bye-lulee, lulay.

Herod the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day;
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young, to slay.

Then woe is me, poor Child, for Thee,
And ever mourn and say;
For Thy parting, nor say nor sing,
By-bye-lulee, lulay.

Friday Jukebox: Obamamerica Hellscape Edition

A little piece of America back when it was still great. Well, sorta. So long as you were white. And straight. And male.

But, hey, who isn't, amirite?

Sorry. I just needed a little cool West Coast sound to chill me out after the ridiculous shit that went down in the Sportspalast along the Cuyahoga. Hope you have a swingin' weekend.

Friday Jukebox: Dirty Deeds Done Damn Spendy Edition

This is, apparently, a parody of some sort of Miley Cyrus song called "Party in the USA". I ran into the video at Frank Moraes' place and, like him, liked the goofy Cubist cartoon style. But, like him, I can see how this isn't exactly a purely-for-fun sort of thing.

"Party in the CIA" also bothers me

Frank says,

in that it is the kind of thing that people can take differently on the basis of their politics. I know that Yankovic is a liberal. But I also know a lot of authoritarians who would watch this video and come away with the idea that it would be totally great to be in the CIA and topple unfriendly governments. The truth is, in this song, Yankovic doesn't tip his hand. That's great for most subjects. Not for this.

Yep. Living as we are in the Age of Trump, where "terrorists" are people who kill people with cheap automatic weapons and homemade explosive belts but not people who kill people with silenced rifles or torture or air-launched cruise missiles...yeah. I can see the problem here.

Friday Jukebox II: Retro-retro Edition

Kind of awesome, kind of creepy...kind of...well, you make up your mind.

(h/t to Scalzi for this)

Friday Jukebox: That Fucking Wall Again Edition

Given that I have time on my hands and my laptop speakers finally working again I thought I put up a Friday Jukebox and this one grabbed me by the throat. I originally posted this tune almost two years ago.



But it just never seems to grow old, does it?

If Donald Trump had the actual gravitas and ironic self-knowledge that Greg Brown puts into his Hades in this tune you could almost hear him growling to his Trumpeters:

HADES
What do we have that they should want?
My children, my children
What do we have that they should want?

CERBERUS
What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon!
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
My children, my children
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That's why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free.

As I said back then; "...echoing the little trickle of tired, sullen anger that's always within me as my country slides unthinking into the New Gilded Age. I love the funky growl Brown gives his Devil, smoothly chortling his way to his appointment with Armageddon while he grins mercilessly at the fucking rubes and fools he's got doing his work for him."

Or, as the Mexicans might say; Chinga tu pared, gringo

Friday Jukebox: Je suis désolé Edition

Because, frankly, I am feeling desolate and far from home today.

But any day when Mark Knopfler can swing it zydeco fashion can't be entirely without hope.

Friday Jukebox: Far, far away edition

This is because I'm on my third day of two weeks covering a grading job in Medford, down in Oregon's Dixie. I'm fairly dirty and tired and bored of eating bad food and living out of a suitcase and it's only the third fucking day, ferchrissakes. I tried to think of something more uptempo and realized I just wanted something slow and kind of dreamy and sad.



Here come the priests, each one wailing and bemoaning
Lordy, they got their heads bowed down
Here come the madmen, they're too excited for atoning:
"Burn the mosque," they're shouting, "Burn it down!"

Hard to believe that Carly wrote that something like forty years ago. Damn.

It's been something of a difficult autumn for me. The Boy is ever more difficult, apparently because he has some variation of "attention-deficit disorder" which, apparently, also makes you kind of an asshole. The real irking part is that he's only an asshole to my Bride, who is the sweet, loving parent (as opposed to the irascible, impatient, demanding, um, well, me...) and who has busted her butt to try and make things easier for him. Well, he's burning that bridge like a torch in the night and driving his little sister - who is a really loving little soul - completely out of patience with him.

The real problem with this is that my presence - even if I'm not looming over him in a sort of Evil Stepdaddy sort of way - seems to turn the little bugger's Asshole down to background noise. It's when I leave for an extended time - as I have now - that Satan's Child comes roaring back out. It drives me nuts, because my Bride takes the hammer and there's nothing that I can do.

And just in case I didn't have anything to feel sorry for myself about, my right hip has decided that being a small, nagging sort of irritation isn't really fun, so it's gone flat-out, full-throttle, shove-the-shank-in-and-leave-it-and-cripple-the-sonofabitch. I can still walk, sort of, with a really awful torquing sort of motion that resembles nothing so much as Igor in the old Frankenstein flicks. But it hurts, hurts like a bastard. I don't even want to talk about putting a sock on my right foot; sometimes I've been that close to tears as the simple act of putting a tube of cloth on a piece of muscle and bome less than three feet away from my hand is just flat out frigging impossible.

I've come to dread these away-from-home trips just because I fear that I'm going to get up one morning and no amount of effort will let me put my sock on or tie my bootlace and I will have to go, barefoot, to some horrified stranger asking for help like a beggar in the marketplace.

My replacement date is now in March, because my current employer - for whom I worked for years back in the day has concluded that my "period of employment" dates only from my RE-hiring in February of this year. Which means I am ineligible for medical disability leave or paid benefits until after that date in 2016.

So I shamble around like some spastic zombie and curse my leg and my ill-fortune.

But enough self-pity, dammit.



I wanted to throw this up before I go, though; it's the full album from which I got the Karen Alexander song Brown Shoes I posted here a while back. If you're looking for something fun and uptempo, forward to 23:00 and the song Baghdad Ragman. You want hooky?

"Hussein the barber's got a razor like a saber, and
Hassan the butcher has a brother who's a baker, and
The whole bazaar it hums like a song, and
The Baghdad ragman comes with the dawn..."

Oh, yeah. I think you'll like it.

Tuesday Jukebox: Prisoners of Starvation Edition

From the Croatian Slovene group Laibach, whose work is either the most ingeniously subtle neogothic-neofascist neo-prog rock I've ever encountered or the most ingeniously subtle send-up of neogothic-neofascist neo-prog rock I've ever encountered (not so much this one but their cover of Opus' 1980s hit Life is Life).



As The Donald would say, youuuuuuuuuge extra credit for the Internationale. I loves me some Internationale.

Remember when I said a year or so back that I just had nothing more to say about the U.S. political process? That the entire maguffin was so thoroughly riddled with ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision, that the money had so thoroughly corrupted the whole shithouse, that the ginormous elephant-in-the-room-problem was that somewhere between a quarter and a third of U.S. citizens identified as Republicans and that the sorts of people who were still Republicans were clearly the sort of human dross that intelligent civilizations would find too credulous to be made into citizens, too stupid to be made into subjects, and too vicious to be made into slaves?

Well, that hasn't changed. I still have nothing worth saying that hasn't been said better elsewhere, and my opinion of the nation in general hasn't changed, either: We. Are. So. Fucked.

Fortunately for you Paul Bibeau still does, and he's tearing up the Trumpster. This post alone is worth the price of admission and the admission is free.

You really need to buy a copy of his book, too.

Oh, and those of you in need of more bloggage from this shebeen?

In about a month I am going to have my hip resocketed, borescoped, and pulled over. I will be completely bedridden for weeks and then housebound for months. So, be warned. Idle hands are a devil's playground, and I suspect that there is a devil in me, yet.

A youuuuuge devil, full of barbed spite and ire.

But we'll see.

Friday Jukebox: Saturday Night Edition - Panjabi Hit Squad

Just been sent this and these girls ROCK!!!!! #Bhangra#LIKE - Panjabi Hit SquadThanks to @kay__ray @ginusidhu and @h_dhaliwall for making a AWESOME video!

Posted by Panjabi Hit Squad on Saturday, June 20, 2015

Thanks, mike! These girls rock like they invented it!