UNREMITTING FAILURE

The Long Boogie

We love the late sixties, because it was a time when no band worth its salt was content to record a song that was less than 22 minutes long.   It was at this time that it first became apparent that Rock N. Roll's middle initial stood for "Noodle."  Every song had to have two guitar solos, a long baroque organ break, and matching bass and drum solos.  Canned Heat's "Refried Boogie" may well be the king of the extralong songs, clocking in at around 40 minutes.  The Allman Brother's "Mountain Jam" probably meanders on about the same amount of time too.  We're talking about songs that if you wanted to hear them in their entirety, you had to be prepared to put down the bong, extricate yourself somehow from your dayglo beanbag chair, and get up and actually turn the album over, by which time you'd forgotten why you got up in the first place and put on the Electric Flag instead.  If you wanted to hear a double-sider without a break, you needed two copies of the album, two turntables, and two hippies, one to pull the needle off turntable one and another to drop the needle on turntable two with choreographed precision in order to eliminate dead air.  And seeing as how most hippies were too stoned to even stand up, this was virtually impossible.  As a result, most people never heard "Refried Boogie" in its entirety, or heard side two before side one and thought that's the way the song was built, or heard side one one day and side two the next and thought that it was made with a nine hour solo on electric silence built right into the middle, kind of like "drums and space" without the drums.

Priscilla Gardner

Priscilla Gardner, the mother of UF's eldest brother David's wife Heidi, passed away Thursday at the age of 83.  Priscilla, a lifelong thespian, was upbeat until the end.  We don't think we ever saw Pris (that's her to the far left of Jean Stapleton) without a smile on her face.   If there's a heaven, she's up there now, gangpressing St. Peter to join her production of Oklahoma!  Down here, she will be missed. 

Country Living

We're at our sister's palatial country estate outside York Pa.  Lynne is the black sheep in the family, insofar as she took a wrong turn in life and acquired wealth.  She just bought a green convertible Porsche Roadster that'll go 60 mph in first gear and last night when she showed it to us we nearly wept from sheer envy.  It's a wet dream with a powerful engine and if she would give us even five minutes in it we would set a new land speed record before running into a tree.  Why Sis isn't willing to hand over the car keys, we'll never know.

Our sister made her money in the insurance racket, which although you wouldn't think it is an ego-boosting business.  We opened her refrigerator last night, and there on the top shelf were some plastic bottles of water with our sister's picture on them.   How cool is that?   We want to drink bottled water from bottles with our picture on them.

Anyway, we're close to nature out here, and Alex is nervous.  Last night three deer wandered up to one of the small apple trees close to the house and as we stood watching them from behind the kitchen door Alex plaintively whispered, "What do they want?"

This morning we walked down towards the stream through the wet grass, then stopped to hurl walnuts in their green shells at an old farm cart with the words "Antiques" painted on its side.  This country living almost makes us feel like one of the Waltons, the tall one who smoked pot and played professional basketball and had some kind of weird connection with the Symbionese Liberation Army.

We know that deep down inside of us there resides a real hayseed who hankers to hunker down outside a small town feed store and spit tobacco juice into the dirt.  Who longs to walk barefoot through the morning dew and gnaw at big broken chunks of juicy watermelon like some kind of rural imbecile.  It's all we can do to keep this fella in his cage.   If he ever gets out, god help us. 

We can't help it

We wish Gwen Stefani would blow up.

More Songs About Buildings and Dancing Aquatic Rodents

Muskrat Susie, Muskrat Sam
Do the jitterbug out in muskrat land
And they shimmy
And Sammy's so skinny

In the late seventies everybody thought the Talking Heads were so cool for singing songs about how animals are treacherous and electric guitars are dangerous.  But the Captain and Tenille had 'em beat.  They were singing about rodent sex!

It's funny how the passage of time clarifies things.  Back in the day, we thought C&T were pussies.  It took 30  years for us to realize they were perverts. 

And it's not like we didn't have clues.  How pervy was that captain's hat, for instance?  It's like Freddy Mercury, the purloined letter of rock.  His was a gayness so flaming that it should have melted every bong in a 9,000 mile radius, but everybody we knew thought he was God's gift to poontang!

It's only in hindsight that what was obvious becomes clear.  Believe us, twenty years from now everybody is going to wonder how they ever thought Oprah was a human.

The Futility Player

Living is a cheap parlor trick, anybody can do it.  You just have to get the hang of it.  It's a simple matter of convincing yourself that things will be better tomorrow, despite the overwhelming preponderance of convincing evidence to the contrary. 

Any truly healthy society would celebrate its suicides as spiritual beings possessed of the wisdom and courage necessary to say enough is enough.

The futility player is the person who sees the utter futility of going on but goes on anyway, out of sheer perversity.  It's a ridiculous position to find oneself in, but there you are.  And it's not so hard really.  All you have to do is put on your glove and go where the coach tells you. 

And when the ball comes your way, duck. 

More: Of The Songs That Annoy Us!

This week's most hated pop song is Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry."  Never, and we do mean never, have we heard such dumb lyrics infused with such inane and breathless conviction of their "poetic depth."  The whole song never sets our teeth on auto-grind, but our apoplectic apocalypse always occurs when she sings, "Fairy tales don't always have a happy ending, do they?" in a knowing "deep thoughts" lilt.  It's a moment of such space-and-time-bending banality we find it hard to believe that the world doesn't just... implode or something.  And you know why it doesn't?  Because just like certain fairy tales, real life doesn't have a happy ending either.   

Food!

Everybody eats it! 

And now you can read about it here!  That's right, our old pal Annie has started herself a food blog, wherein she taunts us mere mortals with mouth-watering tales of all the dainties and delectables that she gets to sample and we don't because she happens to reside in the Big Bagel, New York City!! 

It's downright cruel, her blog.  She really ought to call it The Saucy Sadist.

Personally, we love food.  In fact, it's the only thing keeping us alive.  If it weren't for the thought of missing the next meal, we'd have probably offed ourselves years ago. 

Some people rely on God, we rely on Hebrew National. 

We love sausage and rice krispy treats and peanuts and sushi and big green olives with pimentoes and twizzlers and omelettes and french fries and smoked salmon and raisin bran and big juicy hamburgers and feta-cumcumber-onion salad and fish in tins and glazed donuts and petit fours and pretzels and turkey and stuffing and pickled eggs and chocolate, although we've been avoiding the last named on account of our Hall of Fame cholestorol scores. 

Anyway, check out Annie's food blog.  It's hungry-making.  Maddening, actually.  The woman ought to be ashamed of herself. 

Morning Has Broken

Us. 

We gave it all of your names.  Call us a traitor if you like.  But it sweated us with its bright light after dragging us from a sound sleep and we finally cracked when it offered to swap your names for a cup of coffee. 

Anybody would have cracked under those circumstances. 

Don't bother trying to run.  The morning's going to find and break you just like it did us, just like it does everybody in the end.  It's monstrous.  And the worst part about the bastard?  The cheeriness.

Our Shadow

We've had it with our shadow.  It's so contrary.  We looked at our shadow this morning, it was wearing bell-bottoms. 

Not only does our shadow insist upon following us everywhere, it gets us in trouble when we get there.  Last night a woman pushing a baby stroller ran over our shadow, and it promptly snatched the pacifier from the baby's mouth and hurled it into the street. 

We get really tired of dragging our shadow around with us wherever we go.  And we're tired of it making scenes.  The other day we happened to look over at our shadow and it was doing jumping jacks, right out in the middle of the street.  People looked at us funny.  When it saw we were looking it fell back into position, but we could hear it snickering.

We have tried to push our shadow off cliffs.  It's not as easy as it looks.  As we both plummet earthwards it can't resist ostentatiously scratching its head and going, "Duh?"