Alice and Arlo, lifted from the latter’s Facebook page.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings just before Thanksgiving, but you can’t get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. The restaurant is long gone, and now, so is Alice.
Extra Special Bonus Fact: Did you know Alice was a Pelkey? Neither did I. I’ll consult the Counselor, see if he was aware that he was related to criminal and culinary royalty.
We’ll give a thought (and an ear) to Alice and Arlo on Thursday as we have another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.
Peter Sinfield, the lyricist for King Crimson’s first four albums, has toddled off to the Court of the Crimson King. He was 80.
Progressive rockers like King Crimson and Pink Floyd were big on my personal hit parade in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Probably the upshot of taking piano and flute lessons, playing in school orchestras, digging the big-band music my parents loved, and like that there. A “more-is-more sensibility,” asThe New York Times obit puts it.
The single “21st Century Schizoid Man” was killer, you should pardon the expression, since it took actual killers to task with lyrics like “Blood rack, barbed wire/Politicians’ funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire. …”
Eventually my musical tastes became less grandiose, more stripped down. Even so, I still prefer bombast to bombs.
What, you haven’t heard they have a National Mall in DeeCee?
Wherever shalt thou see a man on horseback, there also shalt thou see a horse’s ass. And sometimes more than one of them, too.
The endless pearl-clutching in the national media over Orange Julius Caesar doing exactly what we all expected he would do has me longing to grab some button-down editor a little lower — by the family jewels — and drag him around the room, growling like a mad dog.
Which of course is what I am.
But that would be wrong. Fun, but wrong.
So I’ll just leave you with that improbable visual and this all-too-probable audio — yes, yes, yes, it’s time for a Shakespearean edition of Radio Free Dogpatch.
• Technical notes: Still loving the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. If it ain’t broke, etc. The gibbons and fanfare are courtesy of Freesound. Wrestling action comes to you from an old clip on YouTube. The cartoon tune, “Out of Step,” comes from Zapsplat. All the other bad noise is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.
Stalking around El Rancho Pendejo, muttering to myself as I ticked off the morning chores one by one, I got to thinking how nice it would be if somebody came around regularly to haul off all the garbage stinking up my skull.
Wouldn’t that be convenient? Just flip my lid, yank out the sack full of bad news, worse ideas, outdated references, and pointless distractions, heave it into a black plastic cart, and roll it down the driveway where someone else has to deal with it.
Hm. Wait a sec. We’ve already got something like that. They call it “blogging.”
A fuzzy Beaver Moon, which I suppose could be considered appropriate.
Betimes I wish I had an actual camera instead of an iPhone, especially when zooming in on something like the last full supermoon of the year.
But then I remember that I’m no great shakes as a shooter and the phone that I already own is exactly my speed. I’m not exactly Ansel Adams. More like Gomez Addams, or maybe Uncle Fester.
Hell, people who know what they’re doing shoot movies — actual films, not TikTok dances or cute-animal videos — using iPhones.
Not me, of course. Because (a) I don’t know what I’m doing, and (2) I don’t really want to learn.
When I was shooting bike reviews for Adventure Cyclist and teasers for Charles Pelkey’s Live Update Guy it was occasionally fun, kinda, sorta. But also complicated, because I was using a GoPro, or a more traditional camcorder — Sony VIXIA mini X or Panasonic HC-V770 — and there’s a whole lot of wobble when you’re recording video and audio in the wild, especially when the production crew is dumber than a bag of hammers and your leading man has a radio face.
Anyway, them newfangled consarned moving pictures do all the work for the audience. When you read or listen to a story, your imagination has to break a sweat. With video it just sorta slouches on the couch with one hand in the popcorn bowl and the other thumbing a phone, checking to see if there’s something better on.
Mad Blog Media 