so, you guys have all probably seen barney frank's hilarious retort to a (dare i say vaguely cute?) lyndon-larouche-crazy-person. but the rest of that town metting was pretty batty as well. i can't help feeling a bit of a morbid fascination with this.

also, does anyone know what lyndon la rouche's deal is, politically? i tried going on his website, and it was so convoluted that i decided to abort mission. i know why glenn beck thinks obama is a fascist (something to do with deficit spending during the weimar republic), but i don't know what these la rouche people are yammering on about, particularly since they're often depicted as "from the left"...

Fires

Here's a view form my roof from today:

Here's a detail that looks like what the album art should be if Brian Wilson did a Burzum tribute album. (Click image to supersize.)I should be ok, since the fire would need to jump the river and 2 freeways to get to me.

For a sense of scale, here's a map of L.A. I live where the red X is.

Anna Domino - Land Of My Dreams

this is an aretha franklin cover. anna domino is so great, last i read she lives in joshua tree area. hey justin are you safe from the fires? chris and i are doing a raindance for all y'all out on the left coast.

this is really worth watching till the end

version Mix

5 versions of "pirate jenny" by:
nina simone
marc almond
hildegard knef
bea arthur
marianne faithful

http://www.mediafire.com/?yiwlnlremwq


great song i just heard at the end of the 'watchmen: tales of the black freighter' dvd. (the nina simone version)



and...



14 versions of skokiaan by:
Bulawayo Sweet Rhythms Band
Louis Armstrong
Nico Carstens
The Dynamites
Ralph Marterie & His Orchestra
johnny gomez
Ray Anthony & His Orchestra
Bill Haley
Johnny Hodges
The Ventures
Perez Prado & His Orchestra
Hot Butter
Kamen, Michael
Justin Michell

http://www.mediafire.com/?yztfzzdnwmm

the original version is by the bulawayo sweet rhythm band from zimbabwe led by august musaruwa. skokiaan is a really potent south african moonshine. somewhere down the line, a canadian singer named tom glazer added the dopey african stereotype lyrics that armstrong uses. johnny hodges' version has a then unknown john coltrane playing on it. mine was a really fragmented partial version done from having a bit of melody stuck in my head for weeks when i lived in chicago around 1999 not knowing what it was or where i had heard it. it was made on some casio toy keyboards and a 4-track to try to exorcise the tune from my head so i could move on to other things and stop being obsessed with it. i got some of it sort of accurate and added a bunch of other improvised bits over it. about 8 years later i was driving across country and playing one of my mom's cds of louis armstrong and i finally figured out what it had been.

lou learned from the master.

meh. i don't think i'll see it, but less embarrassing than seagal. apparently seagal was given the title of lama? ok, i'm rooting for china.

looks like he's been training for the role at dunkin' donuts.

U2's lost song NEGATIVLAND

i love the top 40 but i remember the hubbub about this track. still holds up good track. i am a fan of casey kasem, though not of U2.

great 80's belgian band. ron and russell mael did all the lyrics on their 3rd album, 'sex.'

LIME - Please say you will

this summer i have listened to so much lime. i love them. this is one of their last singles so great. from 1989.

Billy Ocean - The Long And Winding Road

awww who broke your heart billy?

Fingerbib (Aphex Twin) acoustic cover by Alarm will sound

(this has nothing to do with the band secret mommy...)

New Housemate

more at : elgreenhouse.blogspot.com

my agenda, were i a teabagger...

i always thought it got torn down, but i guess not. there it is.

jps experience: own two feet

first michael jackson, now john hughes

your childhood is disappearing.



also, i never knew until i youtubed this scene (which always struck me as nicely out-of-sync with the rest of the movie) that the music in the background is an instrumental version of "please, please let me get what i want" by the smiths.

Dwight Twilley Looking for the magic

the day after i ran into meg and steven at the tinted windows show they let me know about this killer song.

nice piece in the NYTimes about time spent looking while in museums

this piece strikes a nice balance between the desire to see a lot of things, and the desire to really engage with a select few. it's also somewhat critical, without being too ho-hum about the good old days. i think wexler will like this one, particularly. click on the quote to see the whole article:

Visiting museums has always been about self-improvement. Partly we seem to go to them to find something we already recognize, something that gives us our bearings: think of the scrum of tourists invariably gathered around the Mona Lisa. At one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds of books, or maybe none, but rarely any with the same intensity. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint — to record their memories and help them see better.

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.