Spitball Army

A live performance by Elton John of Ryan Adams’ “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” from EJ’s 2002 Australian tour.  Nice interpretation and piano-playing, despite the Muppet-hands.  The lyrics have a striking similarity to those from the early John/Taupin compositions, which I assume Ryan Adams has a fondness for.

I turned around before the second word had even left her mouth. As my weight shifted onto my left foot, I threw my right out to balance myself and groped the wall for something to hold onto. The leather sole of my shoe hit an icy patch on the porch and took off like a rocket, shooting out behind me. During that split second while I was suspended in air, I looked up and saw her eyes, big as jawbreakers, yet hard and impenetrable.

Eating Dirt: It Might Be Good for You
Experts Claim the Habit of Eating Clay May Be Beneficial for Pregnant Women

By MARC LALLANILLA
Oct. 3, 2005

It melts in your mouth like chocolate, says Ruth Anne T. Joiner, describing her favorite treat.

“The good stuff is real smooth,” she adds. “It’s just like a piece of candy.”

Joiner is describing the delectable taste of dirt — specifically, clay from the region around her home in Montezuma, Ga.

While most people would recoil at the thought of eating mud or clay, some medical experts say it may be beneficial, especially for pregnant women.

“Every time I get pregnant, I get a craving — I have to eat it,” says Joiner, 40, who has given birth to four healthy babies.

“If I could get just one little bitty piece, that would stop the craving,” she says. “It has a fresh, natural-feeling taste, like the rain or something.”

Read the complete, filthy ABC News article here.

There aren’t many perfect things in the world and, as soon as we begin to feel committed that something is approaching perfection, we start to notice flaws.  Then we realize that everything has flaws – that, indeed, nothing is perfect – and our definition of “perfect” gets a healthy loosening.

Thereafter, it is easier to come up with a list of perfect movies.  Casablanca.  Bonnie & Clyde.  Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  Chinatown.  Singin’ in the Rain.  To Kill a Mockingbird.  Fanny & Alexander.  Sure, they all have little problems that we overlook (Gene Kelly can dance but can’t act, for instance, and I still don’t understand how F&A got into that trunk), but overall these and other films (like those on your own list) approach our notion of “ideal.”  This weekend, I saw a movie that made my list immediately: Atonement.

The story is dramatic and engaging, as the source material – Ian McEwan’s novel – is spellbinding literature.  Great cinematography.  Wonderful ensemble acting.  A World War II setting.  Vanessa Redgrave.  And, towering over all of the other masterful qualities of the film is its imaginative use of music.

The story of the film is a tragedy set in motion by the written word.  Briony, the young girl of the house who fancies herself a writer of plays and stories (and has just finished crafting a new play as the film opens), intercepts and reads a typewritten note from her family’s gardener.  The strongly worded note, a draft of a note meant for the girl’s older sister, distorts the girl’s view to such a degree that she later jumps to unreasonable, and regrettable, conclusions.

The main musical theme of Atonement is played as a repetitive motif on a piano.  And recognizing that the physical action of the film is propelled by what happens at a typewriter, composer Dario Marianelli has woven the music from the piano and the sound of a typewriter together.
[audio:Dario_Marianelli___Briony_(from_Atonement).mp3]
It is a brilliant musical move.

Music permeates every moment of this movie.  The sounds of objects in the film ricochet off of the musical score like instruments in a contrapuntal symphony: the click of a cigarette lighter, overhead lights being switched on in an infirmary corridor, the busy clacking of the typewriter keys and wrrrrhh of the platen as the paper is ripped from the carriage.  Robbie, the gardener, fights for the inspiration to compose the perfect love letter to Cecilia, the older sister, by playing a record of La Boheme (itself a tragedy of doomed love).  Briony’s rigid, regimented behavior and mindset are exemplified by her constant march through the hallways of the family’s house, arms straight by her side, making turns at sharp right angles and proceeding like an arrow, accompanied by the even pad of her own feet and the metallic tap-tap-tap of her musical theme (in the audio clip above).

I’ll admit that I became so cognizant of what the music was doing at nearly every moment in the film that many small details seemed to reveal themselves to me as important.  The light from a window on the left side of Cecilia glows warmly between her lips as we watch her light a cigarette.  Robbie’s thumb glances off the edge of a teacup in a clumsy, intimate moment.  The splash of Briony’s foot in a stream folds into the water’s trickling current.  These things each have a musical quality of their own.

By challenging us, in the opening scene, to hear music from such a seemingly mundane object as a typewriter, Dario Marianelli and the film’s director Joe Wright invite us to find music anywhere within the story, and to compose our own individual mental versions of the film’s musical score.  The one I created is still resonating within my skull, four days later.

I am very eager to see this film again.

Here is the full text of an e-mail I received in preparation for a solo acoustic in-store performance by Pete Yorn at my store:

Subject: FW: PETE YORN In-Store Hospitality Rider
Date: Jun 29, 2006  1:47 PM

Here’s Pete’s in-store hospitality rider:

Water — preferably Smart Water

Assorted sodas

Bottle of red wine ($20 min), preferably a cabernet (please include a bottle opener!)

Jack Daniels

Hot water/tea

Honey and lemon

Snacks (i.e. pretzels and Tostitos)

I’ve heard that pretzels can make a person thirsty, but c’mon!  Maybe it was the industrial strength, sea salt-encrusted, hyper-Nacho family pack of Tostitos we gave him that did it.
[audio:Pete_Yorn___Undercover_(live_at_Lasers_Edge).mp3]
“I’ll be back in a minute to sign stuff for you all, but right now I’m THIRSTY!”

She was morose because of “family troubles.” He was morbid because she wouldn’t marry him.  So he said he would kill them both.

“Go ahead, if you want to,” she said.

And that was why Dorothy Monet, 18, artist and fashion designer, was in Lincoln Hospital yesterday with Peter Martono, 25, a Puerto Rican, who slashed her wrists and his.  They will recover.

They were found groping along a dark hallway at 911 Prospect ave., Bronx, where he lives, at 1 A.M. yesterday.

After he had cut the veins, they were sorry and set out looking for a doctor.

(Picture on Page 1)

That picture certainly would have been interesting.

I found this little article among several sheets of old newspaper that were backing a photograph of Arturo Toscanini that I had reframed.  I don’t know which New York paper this was printed in, nor the exact date.  On the back of the clipping is a photo of a very young Ronald Reagan with the following caption:

Ronald Reagan returns to the screen for “Sergeant Murphy,” Brooklyn Paramount film.

The imdb sets the theatrical release date for Sergeant Murphy at 1 January 1938, so this suicide attempt must have taken place during the Christmas holiday season in 1937.

The telephone rings. Twice.

Me:  Hello, [insert store name here].

An elderly Southern woman’s voice is on the other end of the line.  She clears her throat as an introduction.  Twice.  She then says firmly, and like Howell Heflin:  Yes.  I need Rachmaninoff’s Warsaw Concerto in Blue.  [Notice the efficiency of her delivery – no niceties, let’s just get to the fucking point.]

I take a few seconds to mentally digest her request.  Then:  Ma’am, it sounds like you’re possibly looking for three different pieces.  Are you looking for a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue?  They are all three classical piano concertos.  We should have at least one recording from that lot in stock.

Mrs. Heflin shuffles audibly, mutters something like “whahtevah,” then says – one more time for good measure:  Whahtevah.  I need it on cassette.  One of those tape things to play in mah cah.

Ma’am, we don’t carry cassette tapes.  We only sell CDs and some vinyl.

Well, no wonder y’all are going out of business.

Followed quickly by a Mrs. Heflin-instigated click.

In honor of the upcoming 6th, 7th or 8th season of American Idol on Tuesday (there are people who actually keep track of these things, but I am not one of them), here are some tidbits from a recent Newsweek interview with the encyclopedic, all-knowing pop culture mind of AI runner-up Clay Aiken (full interview here):

Have you seen “Spamalot”?
The first time I saw it I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen in my entire life.

Are you a Python fan?
I thought Monty Python was a person until three months ago.

(Soylent Green photo: 1973 MGM)

What about all those Ford commercials on “American Idol”?
That wasn’t a job.
It was part of your job.
It wasn’t a Ford commercial. It was a music video. It was a completely different thing.

Hmm.  Different from this?

• 12. (noun) Radio and Television. a paid advertisement or promotional announcement.

Or this?

• 11. (adjective) paid for by advertisers: commercial television.

I think not, young man.

I really must concentrate my energies on reading a substantial book, a novel, maybe that Steve Martin autobiography.  Too much aimless browsing through magazines and oddball books does little to develop my focus.

That said, here’s the excerpt that has been stuck in my head all day, from Astonish Yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit:

#13  Drink While Urinating
Duration:  1 to 2 minutes
Props:  toilet and glass of water
Effect:  wide open

For hundreds of thousands of years the vast majority of humans have lived and died without trying the following experiment.  It is, however, both extremely straight-forward and extremely interesting.

Like everyone else, you urinate.  And at other moments you drink.  What you do not know is what it feels like to do both at the same time.  This experiment will show you.

So, just have a large glass of water at hand.  When you begin to urinate, start drinking.  As far as possible, you should try to drink the water straight down, without pausing.  You will feel quite bizarre sensations almost immediately.  The water you evacuate seems to be synchronized with that entering your mouth.  You will then visualize, and above all feel, your body to be organized in a way which until then you had never imagined possible.  The water you are drinking seems to exit directly from your bladder.  In a few seconds you will feel directly wired, from throat to urethra, from stomach to bladder – a physiology that is impossible but that you intuit, directly and unquestionably, to be real.

It has taken no more than a few moments for you to discover this wonderfully simple body, and you feel there can be no other.  No more intestine, no kidneys, no filtration time, no waiting.  Water pours through you vertically, a cool liquid washes through you in a peculiar and palpable way.  Your system seems to have opened inside out, with the water flowing smoothly from inside to outside.  It is like – take your pick – the cosmic flux or an automatic washing machine.

This experiment, which can be repeated indefinitely, which costs nothing, and which is likely to procure ever new sensations and surprises, has not hitherto been considered a thermal cure.

I have always felt, since I was a small child, that inside me there was an automatic washing machine just yearning to be set free.

[audio:Hank_Williams___Cool_Water.mp3]
Hank Williams, Sr. (1949)

(photo: unknown)
Late last year the fearless* Josh Ritter took up residence in the L.A. County Natural History Museum’s North American Mammal Hall and played a live set with his band.  The animals, while providing an appropriately primal setting with their presence, were unmoved and immovable (probably because they’d been taxidermised).  Nevertheless, Josh & co. roared through a rockin’ live show that was filmed and will be broadcast on Ovation TV at the end of this month.

Details:  Josh Ritter at The Artists Den, January 31st 2007, 8pm EST (7pm CST/Birmingham time) & 11pm EST (10pm CST).  Additional airing on February 1st at 2am EST (1am CST).

Get yer Tivo, etc., ready!  Patty Griffin’s Artists Den performance will be aired immediately after all three of Josh’s broadcasts (sneak peek here…click on Patty’s picture for some preview video!).

*Fearless = being brave enough to wear a toga on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama at midnight, even if it is Halloween.