All right Rico!

One, two, three, four, pressure!

Hot fives and hot chicks

You may think this is hilarious. I do wish the trumpet parts were a little better, but on the whole it's pretty well-done. Someone knows his early Armstrong.

I appreciate that they went with the 1932 Louis rather than the later, 1950's-era version. The real Louis made some underrated music during the back half of his career, but on the whole, the Hot Fives/Hot Sevens and the pre-1935 pop material are really where it's at. I never get tired of that stuff.

[I hear that Richard Thompson has also covered the Britney song in concert, as part of a mock-educational segment where he attempts to illustrate one thousand years of popular music history. He's been doing Bowling For Soup's "1985" too.]


Now playing: The Angels roaring past the A's.

Powerball (etc)

Two years after Moneyball, here's more worthwhile baseball writing from Michael Lewis.

The Times printed another great baseball story a couple of weeks ago about one Steve Butler, a high-school teammate of Alex Rodriguez, Doug Mientkiewicz, and a few other eventual big-leaguers. Butler was considered the best player on the team back then. According to Robert Andrew Powell's piece, Butler missed out on the majors -- and pro ball, completely -- largely due to his own neglect of his talent. He's now a high school athletic director in Florida with an expanding gut and a mountain of regret, Powell reports. Unfortunately I can't link to it -- you now have to buy the article from the NYT -- but I've got the text here if anyone's interested.


Just heard: Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime." I don't think I've ever heard this song without having a physical reaction. I think we'll still be listening to it in a hundred years. I feel like there's no other artwork that is as successful at describing this specific kind of disorientation, or emotional disturbance, as that song is. I mean, I think it's better than any Kafka I've read, better than everything else that tries to go there. Who else has expressed this same idea as clearly? This is a feeling that should have its own name, and it should be named after David Byrne. It's as if his whole life led up to the point where he could finally articulate this -- just like your whole life can lead up to the point where you say, "This is not my beautiful house."

"Into the blue again/After the money's gone." What's that? Where did that come from?

I've never been able to feel exactly how the transition from verse to chorus works. I always lose the beat somehow, right where the seam is. I know it's straight 4/4. There's no reason why I shouldn't get it, but it's always confusing to me. What a great drum track. What amazing sounds from Eno on top of the groove. And what an incredible vocal from Byrne. How does a person prepare himself to stand in a vocal booth and do that?

There's no way I can think about anything else while "Once In A Lifetime" is playing. (Except maybe Rich Hall.)

Savage republic

Some frothy good news.


Just heard: The Melodic Stan Getz

Hey Joe

Correspondence with my brother earlier today, as the smoke signals from the Vatican appeared:

PB: All these years, and never a [Pope] Joseph until now.... Except he's not Pope Joseph. They're going with Pope Benedict XVI.

Bro: I wonder why there's never been a Pope Joe....

PB: Maybe because all the other Josephs weren't Pius enough?


I crack myself up sometimes.


Just heard: The Easy Way by The Jimmy Giuffre Three, featuring bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Jim Hall alongside Giuffre, who plays a variety of reeds. This is a unique, strange, intense record. The group always seems like it's on the verge of breaking into something stronger, but it remains fairly delicate throughout. Found in the dollar bin five hours ago, along with a couple more Stan Getz and Freddie Hubbard records. You've got to check out Giuffre in Jazz On A Summer's Day too. He's the first performer in the film.

Shaky ground

The Balboa Theater is screening a series of films made in San Francisco (or by local directors) over the next month or so. Tonight, with nothing else on my plate, I headed down to take in San Francisco, a 1936 effort from director W.S. Van Dyke set in 1906, the year of the earthquake and fire that ruined the city. (Today is the 99th anniversary.)

One James Dalessandro, author of the novel 1906, introduced the film, and casually "mentioned" that his novel and resulting screenplay will be converted into a blockbuster movie "sometime in the next six months."

The film itself is rather corny and extremely dated, and the story is actually fairly ordinary. Spencer Tracy is quite good, Clark Gable is appropriately dashing, and Jeanette MacDonald is just fine until she starts warbling, which is every six or seven minutes. (She also sings the same song about six times, at varying tempos.) The only things that really kept me interested were the local references, particularly those in which San Francisco is referred to as some sort of bacchanalian wasteland of sinners. (Rock on!) There's one great comical slap at Los Angeles too. But frankly, I'd expected more quake and less revue. It's pretty much a musical, and I'm not too into MacDonald's style.

But then comes the quake scene. Wow. If this one ever turns up on cable, I hereby advise you to skip the first hour and a half, but don't blink during the minute or so of violent tremors. It's badass. Whole walls of bricks bury people. The dome of City Hall falls down. The ground splits open. Balconies collapse with people on them. (There's even an aftershock, for good measure.) The subsequent fire and dynamiting of buildings are also spectacularly convincing, and the tent city scene is pretty realistic too. It's really a terrifying sequence.

I've only experienced a handful of quakes, all under 5.3 or so. One woke me up from a sound sleep. I missed one when I was rocking out in a noisy practice space. One time I thought someone had fallen down the stairs. I feel like I'm very aware of the risks of living here, and when I enter a room that I expect to spend some time in, I often think of what I would do in the event of a nasty quake. Lots of people -- even locals -- are quite ignorant of the potential for disaster here, either because they don't think they get worse than the 1989 quake (oh, yes, they do) or they believe that that one somehow defused the situation for another hundred years or so (no, it doesn't work like that). Yes, it could happen at any moment. But it's amazing what you can get used to.

I'll tell you one thing: those same moviegoers who were clapping along with Jeanette as she sang that song for the sixth time went silent a moment later when the disaster struck.

Smoke gets in your eyes

Court documents said the suspect allegedly talked of using the man's head as a bong or a pipe for smoking marijuana.


Just heard: Charlie Christian, Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman making exquisite music together on "Flying Home," "Stardust," and my favorite, "Memories of You."

Moonshot of many

I'd like to blog about Freddie Hubbard, Gary Sheffield and the Fenway "fans", the Youngbloods' Elephant Mountain, Dan Haren, the Postal Service (the band, not the USPS), Sam Prekop, the merits of Tanqueray gin, David Foster Wallace's Atlantic piece about talk radio, William Langewiesche's incredible 13-year-old Atlantic piece about the Sahara, and Howlin' Wolf, but I've been either lazy or busy. I can't decide which.

Questions?

The cruel, cruel summer of a water ban

Six years of drought in the American West -- or, perhaps, just over-allocation -- have caused the manmade Lake Powell to drain by more than 65%. As a result, the Cathedral in the Desert can be visited for the first time in decades.

After viewing it in 1963, David Brower compared the flooding of the Cathedral to "urinating in the crypt at St. Peter's."

I took this photo last summer. Navajo Canyon is another of Lake Powell's slot canyons, as is Antelope Canyon. It's hard to perceive the immensity of this piece of rock just from the photo, but I can tell you that the white "bathtub ring" stretched about 120 feet above the water level last July. (The water is about 25 feet lower now.)

The remark in the Times article about the boat ramps reminds me of our experience on the lakeshore. At one access point, the Park Service has created at least three separate parking lots to accommodate people wanting to park close to the lake, because the location of the shore keeps changing. Due to the gently sloping contour of the land there, the waterline has receded significantly with each passing year, so that the ranger station is now close to half a mile from the beach.

And what do you find when you get down to the beach? Monster trucks, with people hucking beer cans into the water. Inky, black water, slick from powerboat oil. I guess that's what a "National Recreation Area" is all about these days. It certainly doesn't feel like the experience you usually have after paying a fee to a National Park Ranger. Sad.

Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness

I really didn't mean for this Weblog to be a resource for finger-in-chili news, but I feel as if I can't let this story slide by without passing it along to you, loyal readers.

Yes, it could have been an exceptionally disgusting scam all along.


Just heard: Lionel Hampton, Charlie Shavers, Barney Kessel and others stretching out on "Stardust," in Pasadena in 1947

Forging genius

My childhood friend Steve is now one of the best young baseball writers in America, if not simply one of the best baseball writers in America. His new biography of Casey Stengel, Forging Genius, is on the verge of release, and has been reviewed glowingly by the Newark Star-Ledger, among other publications. I ordered mine from Amazon last week, but it appears to be back-ordered. I think that means good things for Steve, if he's sold out the first batch already.

Meanwhile, Steve's AL preview is here.

Oh yes. Play ball!


Just heard: The Art of the Modern Jazz Quartet, a collection from the Atlantic years

But why Tracey Ullmann?

Fun with names. I think the Smiths one is my favorite.

My family had a little game where we would take note of people whose names were complete sentences. I think it all started with Norman Fell. There are tons of them. We always thought it would make a good picture book: a cartoon of Norman Fell falling down the stairs, Bert Parks behind the wheel, etc.


Just heard: Duke Ellington's 1968 studio session of "C-Jam Blues."

Rookie of the year

Happy 20th birthday to the greatest baseball hoax ever.

I believed it for a couple of days. I was 12.


Just heard: Yo La Tengo's "Upside Down," and Iron & Wine's cover of the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights"

Uprising

"A BBC press officer, contacted by AFP in London on Friday, confirmed that the gaffe was not an April Fool's joke."