My old tuba teacher, Sam Green, died last week. He played in the Cincinnati Symphony for something like 35 years, and taught at the University for over 50. His style was from another time: both his corny, nervous personal manner and his big, vibrato-heavy tuba playing. Yet he was the begetter of Blood & Stone, and anyone who knew him who would smile in recognition when I said I was one of Sam’s students. The cliché for an original like Sam is that when they made him they broke the mold, but in fact he was the mold.

Things I learned about the Ronettes on the occasion of their being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

I had always thought, based on those incredibly nasal voices, the Ronettes were from Philadelphia, but apparently they are from Spanish Harlem, NYC. (I may also have been misled by the fact that they recorded for the Philles label.)

I had wondered what their ethnicity was under all that make-up: black? Puerto Rican? Sicilian? The Bennett sisters, Ronnie and Estelle, are mixed-race, black and Native American mother and white father, while cousin Nedra (the cute one) is African-American. (I know, I know, race is a social construct not a biological one.)

Phil Spector is on the Rock-&-Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee, and till now had black-balled the Ronettes. They made it in this year because he was otherwise engaged with his current legal difficulties.

Oh, did anyone else see the Switzerland Invades Lichtenstein story?

Last night there was a 4.2 earthquake, which is considered moderate. I’ve experienced really small earthquakes that just feel like a truck driving by or the cat jumping on the bed and in December there was a minor one that made me think that the neighbors had crashed their car into our house. The one last night felt like a meteor had landed in the yard. Norman ran to the door to see who was shaking up the house. By the time I thought of standing in the doorframe the quake was already over, but I went and stood in it anyway just to see what it was like.

The movie The Science of Sleep has a scene in which a piano gets stuck in a staircase. Unlike Tanta Dori's, it falls down the stairs, though miraculously it's still playable.

Where are they now?

Entertainment Weekly reports that the Stooges have a new album due out next month. Rock Action and his brother Scott will be joining Ig; MIA are Dave (OD'd on alcohol) and James (he's gone straight.)

Tuna or Turkey?

Had lunch in the St. John's Annapolis coffee shop yesterday in between press conferences and hearings on the repeal of the Death Penalty in Maryland. Saw Peter Kalkavage helping a student with his essay on the Sophist. Had nothing of value to offer on the subject, and was paid accordingly. Saw the campus dog (Kady?) and discussed W. Spector, the dog, and the dorm with her handler. I had the turkey club sandwich, while my friend opted for the tuna sub, in deference to his health-related dental deficiencies. He was, however, able to obtain not one, but two, extra pickles, which he seemed to enjoy immensely. We did not make much of a scene at the Senate hearings. We were just there as citizen support. The Death Row exonerees who were there thanked us for coming, as if I was suffering in some way by enjoying an early Spring afternoon carrying a message of peace and love around Annapolis, and having a sandwich to boot! More people should try being as lucky as I am, it is quite fun. As for the rest of you, will that be tuna, or turkey? Tufurkey?

Howie Zowie

Last Friday I went to an Alumni Seminar on a couple of Borges stories led by Mr. Zeiderman. He sort of looks like Jerry Springer now.

More Jodorowsky

I rented Jodorowsky’s first movie, “Fando y Lis”, a black-&-white from 1968. It shows its Bunel, Artaud and Fluxus group roots a little more plainly than “El Topo”, but still has the rambling non-structure, the archetypal images and plenty of good old-fashioned weirdness (old ladies maliciously squeezing canned apricots, a man taking blood from a woman’s arm with a syringe then drinking it from a shot glass, e.g.) There is also a documentary on the disk from which I learned that Jodorowsky made a Hollywood movie with Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif and Christopher Lee; that he started but never completed a film version of “Dune” in the 70s; and that he invented the mime-trapped-in-a-box cliché for Marcel Marceau. The film also has one of the best commentary tracks I’ve ever bothered to listen to, in which he shares in his heavily-accented English such observations as, “Always I have a big...a good feeling about castration. No?”

By the way, the Blogger people made me open a Google account to access this site. I'm not sure why but I suspect everyone else will have to as well to be able to post.

Fresh Ideas?

My friends and I did our waterboarding simulation at the big Peace March in Washington last weekend. It went pretty well, and we plan on enhancing it some and doing it again in March. One of our goals is to provide images that help illuminate the anti-war and anti-torture effort. This is important, as demonstrated by our success in getting a nice, big picture in the Washington Post, etc. Of course, once an image is created and disseminated, you have to come up with a new image to move forward. Nobody is going to pay any attention to something they have seen a hundred times before. I'm posting to ask for help from my creative old friends in generating fresh ideas for actions and images. My vision is to bring forward the idea of "Blood On Our Hands", and to humanize the effects of war. One idea I have is to make a video of a simulation of someone blowing up their own hand by placing it over a small explosive device. Another idea is to use buckets of blood and gore, and allow viewers to accept that we all have blood on our hands, and that we can move forward as humans with the humility and restraint that such a condition must imply. Another idea is to apply bloody handprints in appropriate places, such as Joe Lieberman's and John McCain's senate offices. If any of you have any good ideas in these directions, please pass them on to me. As you know, we aren't just playing around here. Ain't no Fal-De-Ral, if you know what I mean.
Don't you know that it's the children we're killin' ?
jim

I dreamed I was lying in bed, as I was, and that the shadow of the Angel of Death passed over me. That was scary.

Campus dog

http://alumni.stjohnscollege.edu/?newsletterW07b


Reminds me of the time Mike Coss said a dog "followed him home" and it turned out to tbe the governor's.

Well I'm back and I didn't get to the book on pigeons, though I did read I married a dead man by Cornell Woolrich and she really did marry a dead man, two in fact, though she says she didn't kill either of them. My hernia, as I believe is the rule, was caused by intestines poking through a hole in my stomach lining and didn't reach down as far as my scrotum. Fixing it up did require cutting down low in the same general area, though I wasn't in the hospital for even half a day, as one never is these days. Mostly I was at home, trying to avoid lifting things, sneezing, laughing or having the cat jump on me.

That rock-&-roll nurse, she just kept making it worse, a-shooting it to my head. Have you heard the new Dolls album? Well it's not a Dolls album at all, how could it be, it's David Jo's first rock album in 25 years. But hey, guess what, Sylvain Sylvain plays on it, and he co-wrote most of the songs.

When you get out of the hospital, let me back into your life

I'm going to be having hernia surgery tomorrow, so I'll be away from the Bar for a few days. I have some Raymond Chandlers, a book on pigeons, a couple of crossword puzzles, some Marx Brothers movies, a "Sgt. Bilko" DVD and, I hope, a big handful of codeine to entertain me while I'm recovering.

Jodorowsky

The Castro Theater in San Francisco will be showing “The Holy Mountain” and “El Topo” this weekend not, as could be wished, as a double bill but on separate days. When “El Topo” played in Geneva there was a Fast Fun outing with Jim Henry that I could not attend because of Landwehr practice, and I have never been able to locate either film on video or DVD. However if I don’t have band practice on Sunday I should probably go visit Grandma, and then there’s also a Lubitch retrospective at the Pacific Film archive in my new hometown. Decisions, decisions.

Laying Right Here in My Favorite Place

Just a little shot from yesterday's "Shut Down Guantanamo" demonstration in DC. This photo was on page 3 of the Washington Post today, and the accompanying article can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/11/AR2007011100964.html
Don't worry, I'm in there somewhere.

Happy New Year

Been traveling with Mira and Jai without much access to the web for the past three weeks. So greetings from Switzerland (not much snow, but we ski-ed anyway). Saw Mary and John too, who are pretty well in Geneva. Saw Matti in the Bernese Oberland. Also got fogged in in London for 3 days - which was fun: losing control (of my schedule). Guess it would have been a bummer if the children hadn't been with me. Regarding 2006 reading, I'm sorry to say that I never made it past Volume 2 of Gibbon, but did very much enjoy Dawkins' "The Ancestors Tale" and a book called "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley about sex, genes, and evolution. Finally, "Cutty, One Rock" was very nice and very reminiscent of some of my growing up in Joi-zee.
Love on ya, as Dame Bowie used to say. (Speaking of which, Mira got turned on by Lou Reed's Transformer at a New Year's Party so I got her the CD -- makes a papa proud.)

Actually Mr Blood hasn't been out of town he’s been at home; since I work at a school I get the week between Christmas and New Year's off. However my computer is far too weak to post to the Bar, so I have to write my postings at home and then actually upload them from work. So now today on New Year's Day I'm writing at home and I'll post it from work tomorrow, Tuesday, which would be today to the reader or perhaps even yesterday or last week. I've spent my week reading, walking the dog, binging first on Atlantic r-&-b and then on James Brown and eating cheese, since my sister-in-law sent me a big box of cheese for, we'll say, the holidays. I went into San Francisco a couple of times, including once with my sixteen-year-old niece, with whom I saw Casablanca at the Castro Theater, the Brattle Theater of the West. The only other time I've seen the movie on the big screen was at school, when Arthur Kungle stood up and sang along with “Le Marseillaise”. I also did some stuff to sell my house in Woodland which, huh-uh (Tracy-like sigh), we still haven't sold after six months, though we're in contract and should close soon. That will be quite a relief, as I'll then be able to buy a working computer which will not only be able to upload posts to the Spartan Bar but will also perhaps replace the four-track as the primary Brothers Twain recording device.

I don't specially have any New Year's resolutions, though I have already started the sort of project one resolves to at New Year's, viz. studying Hebrew. My goal is to be able to read the Bible, which I suppose needs no further justification to any Johnnie. I've already hobbled through the first two sentences of Genesis, which takes me up to the big breath brooding over the waters.

I’d like to mention a few books I've read recently (in addition to Berlin Alexanderplatz—thanks again to Lee Preston). The Obscene Bird of Night, by Jose Donoso, is the sort of nightmarish and compelling vision I thought modernist novels were supposed to be before I'd actually read many. Not only does the narrative voice switch throughout, the main narrator appears to be different characters, or who knows maybe they're all the same, and at the end of the book he gets written out of the book like the last Hanukkah candle going out.

I've also been trying to find translations of all the books of Juan Carlos Onetti; The Shipyard and Body Snatcher are probably the easiest to find. The book jacket calls him the Uruguayan Camus, a comparison that for once seems ever so slightly apt, that is if you subtract the programmatic existentialism. The books mix European modernism with James M. Cain hard boiled-ism for a kind of feverish tough-guy nightmare, kind of reminiscent of later Orson Wells.

Finally I just re-read Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, and that would be my strongest recommendation, since it combines greatness with brevity. It's about a man who goes to a small town in search of his father, whom he learns is dead. The man then finds out that everyone in the town who's telling him stories is dead too, and somewhere in the middle of the book he disappears as well and there are only these stories being told by ghosts blowing around on the page. That hardly does it justice; go read it yourself.

Let me join Papa in his commitment to the Spartan ideals of peace, love and magic, not forgetting of course to offer libations to the gods and Ace Shadow. Here's to better things ahead in '07.

Pretty quiet at the Spartan Bar these days. Mr. Blood must be home for the holidays, or something.
In any event, I wish a Happy New Year to all the kids. In the coming year, I hope to be a better person and to spread a message of Peace, Love, and Magic throughout the world. Feel free to join in, wherever you are.
jim p

Ahmet Ertegun, Annapolis class of 1944, passed on today without ever having signed the Spartans.