Magnolia Caboose Babyfinger

I have elsewhere alluded to my out-of-step tastes in music--an indigestible smorgasbord of classic rock, classical orchestra, world music, and weird jazz that no one my age would claim with a straight face. That post also announced me as a sort of closeted connoisseur of metal. Let's just say I savor artful noise in many forms.

Lately my curiosity has been drawn to the nexus of classic rock and early metal in the '60s. In fact I take a perverse antiquarian pleasure in ferreting out the earliest examples of "heavy." The Beatles' "Helter Skelter" could fit in the chronology. The genre was definitely in place by the ominously tinted Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, though I shamefacedly admit I'm put off by Ozzy's distinctive vocal stylings. (His late TV antics are another matter.) However, I have more recently turned to exemplars like Iron Butterfly and my current obssession, Blue Cheer.

Those who made fleeting acquaintance with Blue Cheer as some acid-tinged oddity through their ragged cover of "Summertime Blues" (as I was) would be stunned, perhaps pleasantly so, or possibly enraged on first listening to their "OutsideInside" album. This band gives new shades of meaning to "so bad it's good."

Their liberties with the Stones' "Satisfaction" are enough to make Brian Jones rise from his grave and drag Keith Richards in with him. For that matter, I would not want to have been around Albert King if he ever caught wind of the Cheer's take on "The Hunter." (If you think his love gun is something, wait till he whips out his hate gun...)

As for their original material, the songs tend to flow straight from the crotch by way of a Marshall stack topped by a skull-head bong. Yes, they're that good. The album sounds as if Grand Funk Railroad--19, raw, and just hitting the Flint MI bar circuit--had become derailed by the idea of topping "Axis: Bold as Love," failing definitively and heroically and LOUDLY in the attempt.

Sure, "Just a Little Bit" and "Come and Get It" are big and lumbering enough. But where'd they get the idea to lead off with the piano and soft-focus psychedelia of "Feathers from Your Tree"? I guess it's no stranger than the fire-and-ice results of Mountain's West and Pappalardi. Just a lot less polished.

Apparently there's a lot of Spinal Tap-style history to the band, lots of lineup changes and reunion tours. Some form of Blue Cheer soldiers on, continuing to kick the ass of the likes of BTO and Kansas at county fairs across this great land.

And they're huge in Japan.

Candygram for Mongo

It's heartening to know there is still room on this rock for the likes of Prince Mongo.

Entrepreneur, raconteur, provocateur...possibly even flaneur, for all I know. An all-round colorful character. And modest. Did I mention extraterrestrial?

The greened-over district

Trading trains in the urban congestion of the Loop, one would never think that vast swaths of grassy desolation lie to the south and west. Yet from the air (or by way of Google Earth) there is a stark line between neighborhoods with houses huddled shoulder-to-shoulder and other neighborhoods full of empty lots and isolated two-flats.

Sheltered small-towner that I was when I first came to Chicago, I thought it all looked like city--too many people too close together. It took an impulsive trip on the Green Line from the Loop to Garfield for me to see the emptiness first-hand. Bronzeville looks ravaged in the way I imagined Sarajevo or Grozny might. Long blocks hold but two or three houses, the remaining lots' rubble increasingly hidden under a patchy blanket of grass.

The perverse thought occurred to me that denizens of wealthier and more crowded parts of the city would kill for such open space--perverse given all the deaths of people and buildings to which those flat green spaces give mute testimony. Hence I'm not holding my breath for any 1950s Hyde Park-style urban renewal or 1990s Logan Square-like gentrification or 2000s South Loop-type "adaptive reuse." Nor do I think we'll see anything like a Bridgeport Village coming to Bronzeville or North Lawndale any time soon.

We talk about neighborhoods being "rough," "blighted." Run down or dangerous as they may be, most have a full complement of residences, stores, cars, evidence of life. It doesn't get much more "blighted" than neighborhoods abandoned to the poor and stigmatized by the slightly less poor and stigmatized, underdeveloped by a unequal society, burned down by some of the very people who live there, and now claimed only by the persistent regrowth of grass.

From the air or from a train, grass is deceptive.
Could be lawn, could be park, could be graveyard.

Bi-Curious?

Ooh, is it time for the Winter Olympics again?

Thank you, poverty, for ensuring that I will not be afflicted by more than one channel of non sequitur sports and inane human-interest stories about the people behind the packaged competition.

Not that I as an unrepentant Minnesotan am totally averse to some snowy citius-altius-fortius. It's just that my interest in this particular collection of sports tends to be inflamed in direct proportion to their eccentricity, if not downright insanity.

Curling, for instance, is just plain odd as a concept. But I'm too familiar with it by virtue of a northerly upbringing to be overly critical. Now, luge and skeleton (pick your poison, indeed) are well up there in their extremity quotient; you have to wonder about the mental state of the first luger in a way that you wouldn't about the creator of curling. (Abundant winter, beer, and cabin fever explain a lot, believe me.)

But there is no contest on the craziest winter sport: the biathlon.

Take a loaded rifle into the woods. (Wait, it gets better.) Cross-country ski for thousands of yards. Every so often, drop to the ground and try to pick off some tiny metal target paddles. Repeat ad libitum until someone ends up with a medal.

This has got to be, of any winter sport, the one with the greatest real-world utility. If nothing else, knowing there's a population of spandex-clad crack-shot skiers keeps those shifty Canadians honest and on their side of the border.

Don't think we're not watching...

Heteroglossolalia 4

I've had a bit to say on the current flap over intelligent design in these United States. More will surely follow. For now, I offer a bracing and very widely applicable comment by a scholar who has - for me, at least - helped clarify a great deal about science in society:

"Once it is recognized that knowledge exists only through its reproduction and circulation, the importance of conflict becomes evident: conflict focuses and directs that circulation...The contested circulation of opposing knowledges…is a struggle for truth. Truth matters. Precisely because it matters, truth is often fiercely contested. And if we cannot stand outside that contest to assess it from a neutral standpoint, this does not mean that all claims to truth can be put forward on an equal basis."
Joseph Rouse. 1996. Beyond Epistemic Sovereignty. p.416

Undead vaudevillian cineaste

How well I remember my rapturous adolescent discovery of MST3K on visits to Twin Cities-area relatives.

Ever since it went out of circulation, a void has yawned in the limited cortical space I reserve for thoughtful yet snotty entertainment with esoteric Minnesota references. (Using Pine City Vo-Tech as a punchline works for a really select crowd.) The Onion, good and Midwestern as it is, only takes me so far.

So once I had returned to Chicago it was a bewildering but pleasant surprise to stumble across a TV show airing - and skewering - shitty old movies with a joyously hokey and decidedly local slant.

All hail Svengoolie, scourge of Berwyn!

If your idea of mirth is a late-night pelting by cheesy jokes, rubber chickens, and overdubbed insults stolen from Looney Tunes and Simpsons episodes, you'll think you've died and been exhumed by the Friars Club's cryptkeeper. All you have to do is move to this side of Lake Michigan...

Where's my damn snow???

I want my money back.

I put a downpayment on a real upper Midwest winter when I blew in here in August after two years of SoCal surreality. A "dusting" or two ain't gonna do it.

Who do I need to pimp-slap to get more than a couple day's supply of white stuff?

How about actual cold? Like "hurts to breathe, think I'll stay home" cold.

I have a sweet-ass ski jacket. Columbia. I've barely worn it. By this time in Black History Month I should be sick of that jacket. I should be dreaming - rashly, perversely - about a sticky August walk along the lake.

Not actually walking by the lake. In my tennis shoes.

Now watch: We're gonna have a long, cold, damp, retarded spring ahead of us.

God(s) bless you, Guy Spiro

Do you trust me?

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At the risk of fawning, let me express my sincere appreciation to TMA and its publisher/editor/astrologer-in-chief for the many hours of L-bound reading I have enjoyed. Here's to many more...in many incarnations to come.

Frink Tank

Science and technology studies seeks to treat science - that venerable, intimidating institution - like any other human pursuit or product. I begin to think that a better demystifying job might be done by treating science as fodder for gossip.

Enter the renegade science-nerd smack talking of Frink Tank.

The site's approach shines in a recent post pimp-slapping Darwinian partisan Richard Dawkins for unrepentant anti-religiosity while simultaneously managing to insult the pious. In the words of the very quotable Jabba the Hut, "my kind of scum!"

You may find, dear reader, that I cannot consistently muster the Frinksters' total commitment to the smirk, the 'tude, or the gag. For that, they have my grudging admiration. But I make no promises that I will not (what do the young people say?) "bite" their shtick.

Y'all nerds been warned.