I’m not ordinarily a fan of screen grabs, but this grabbed me from my screen, so. …
Discuss.
Archive for the ‘Audience participation’ Category
Walk, perp
March 30, 2023Symphony for Voices in the Head
January 20, 2023
And a-one, and a-two. …
Maybe it’s time for a stroll down Musical Memory Lane.
What/who were you listening to while growing up, or at least older?
My folks were into the big bands, so we had Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and the like blaring out of the stereo whenever they were in the mood (ho ho ho).
I liked that just fine, and still do. But we all chart our own musical courses, and mine led into some very different waters.
The Beatles hit “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964, and while my sister was wowed, I snorted and thought, “These guys will never be as big as Elvis.” This was the first installment in our “I Will Never Be Smart” series, which continues 59 years later.
I eventually got into the Fab Four, like everyone else, but early on I leaned toward the Animals, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Byrds, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel, The Sir Douglas Quintet and just about any act coming out of Motown — the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.
This goes to show the power of TV and AM radio in the mid-Sixties. Randolph AFB, Texas, was not exactly a multicultural paradise. To be blunt, it was light on Brits, Blacks, and surfers. But Ed Sullivan, Dick Clark, and AM radio helped us find them anyway.
If AM was the gateway drug, FM was the hard stuff. When we got transferred to Bibleburg in 1967 I discovered KKFM, and later KILO; the family console stereo had an FM receiver built in, and so did my mother’s 1962 Mercedes-Benz 220S.
So shit got loud, is what. Led Zeppelin. Black Sabbath. Iron Butterfly. Steppenwolf.
But along about the same time I was stumbling across Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie, David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix, Sly & the Family Stone and Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and Moody Blues, Cream, Traffic and Mountain. Then it was The Allman Brothers and Elton John, Leon Russell and Santana. The Stones were still hanging in there, but the Beatles were off the back.
There was a long stretch of country-hippie during my second tour in college — Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Flying Burrito Brothers, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Charlie Daniels Band, Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Jeff Walker, etc. — which made about as much sense as soul and surf, as I was a middle-class white boy from the ’burbs.
John Prine, Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt made the cut too, for obvious reasons. And the shapeshifting outfit George Carlin once called “Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Merrill, Lynch, Fenner, Pierce, Sacco & Vanzetti” was always warbling in the patchouli background wherever dope was smoked.
Tom Waits stumbled into my playlist somehow, after the Eagles covered his “Ol’ 55.” Los Lobos, too, possibly because I was running around with a crew of San Luis Valley vatos. Where Parliament-Funkadelic came from I have no idea, but suddenly they were there and they stayed and wasn’t nothin’ we could do but put a glide in our stride and a dip in our hip and head on up to the Mothership.
Rockers like ZZ Top and Bob Seger proved invaluable for road trips, which I undertook regularly, being indifferent to long-term employment.
I tiptoed into jazz via the back door — fusion combos like Crusaders and Return to Forever, and smooth-jazz dudes like Grover Washington Jr., Stanley Turrentine, and George Benson — and kept one ear tuned to classical because I had played piano and flute as a sprout.
This was a breeze, thanks to NPR. In Corvallis I could pick up three different NPR affiliates, each with its own specialty — jazz, classical, and whatever. Samey same in Bibleburg, with its excellent stations KRCC and KCME, and Denver with KUVO and KVOD.
I was late to punk, which may explain the Green Day discs in my collection. The Cars, Stray Cats, and Brian Setzer Orchestra are in there too, as are Stevie Ray Vaughan, James McMurtry, Planxty, Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, Steve Earle, The Pogues, Warren Zevon, Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Frank Zappa, Lyle Lovett, The Bueva Vista Social Club, Dire Straits, and Half Man Half Biscuit.
Good God awmighty. Each of the voices in my head likes a different kind of music! No wonder they’re arguing all the damn’ time.
Fence ’em out, not in
April 19, 2022
All in all it’s just another tree and a wall.
Good fences make good neighbors, they say. (Hint: Fences work best if the neighbors keep their gates closed.)
Fences, walls, and gates seem to be keeping deer and Russians out of the yard. But how do we keep the Russians — along with Elon Musk, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, and the Kardashians, this last a species more invasive than deer, Russians, or kudzu — out of our heads?
A few of us were discussing this via email recently, and I chimed in thusly:
As a lifelong news junkie I hate to say it, but we should all try to pay a little less attention to what they call “news” these days.
Fully half of it is nonsense, and a quarter of it is something we can’t do anything about. The final 25 percent may have some bearing on you and yours, concerning something you can actually get a handle on. It will probably be local news. If you can find any.
What people like me used to call news 40 years ago was still pretty overwhelming on the supply side. We whittled it down and sold it in 24-hour doses, like allergy meds. It could boggle the mind at times, but most folks could take it, learn a little something, form a few defensible opinions.
Now anyone trying to keep up feels like a dog with his head out the window of a hopped-up Honda Civic doing 110 mph coming into the Big I at drunk-thirty on Friday. There’s just too much going on out there for one poor mutt to take in
Imagine my surprise when an industry bigwig agreed with me. Ken Doctor, a media analyst and consultant who is a longtime contributor to Nieman Lab, wrote that he too is trying to fence out the wider world with all its horrors while he focuses on nurturing a startup local news outfit in Santa Cruz, Calif.
I recently talked to an old friend about a project we were working on together. He could hardly engage, so troubled was he by the news from Ukraine. What’s going on in the broader world is bleak, more than enough to depress and deflate us. I’ve put all that in the back of my head because I have little time or room to address national or global issues on which I can have little impact. I’ve been working on Lookout now for more than three years, and it’s the hardest, most consuming thing I’ve done in a 47-year career. But as I, and my peers, focus fiercely on rebuilding our little parts of the planet, we focus on what we can change.
Well. Just goes to show you even a dumb dog can dig up a moldy Milk-Bone now and then, if he can just keep the deer and the Kardashians out of his yard.
Brother, can you spare a dime*?
October 15, 2020
“Can ye spare some cutter me brother?”
In comments Shawn wonders whether we accept donations here at Ye Olde Chuckle Hut.
The short answer is “No.”
I’ve thought on it for the better part of quite some time, because everyone likes to get paid for work, especially if they are me. And a blog, even a dime-store model like this one, is work.
Also, there are expenses. They’re not massive, but still, yeah, money goes out. None comes in.
Nevertheless, I’ve resisted setting up a subscription model, or a tip jar, for a variety of reasons.
First and foremost: The blog and its various side projects constitute a hobby, not a job. I’ve had jobs, and frankly I can’t recommend them. They suck all the joy out of work. And for what? A little bit of money.
Since 1991, when I left the newspaper game and opened my own little free-range rumormongery, I have cashed checks more or less regularly and outlived a number of publications that wrote them.
Over the years editors and publishers occasionally proved irksome, as they will, because they are running what they believe to be businesses, not open-mic’ nights in some dank basement.
Thus the blog, which commenced sometime in the Nineties, I guess, possibly at AOL. A window to shout out of. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
At the blog I got to be not just a cartoonist, writer, or editor, but all of these things, plus photographer, videographer, podcaster, and publisher. The last four involved something of a learning curve (and still do), and a student really shouldn’t expect to get paid.
As The Patrón told Doc with a shrug in “Sweet Thursday,” “You have to pay to learn things.”
But not here. If you learn anything here, which seems highly unlikely, take it with my compliments (and a grain of salt). The bike magazines, God love ’em — the ones that survive, anyway — haven’t caught on yet; they’re still paying me. And so is Uncle Sammy, until he gets the camps built. Direct your extra pennies to some worthy cause.
* The sharp-eyed may notice that the coin changing hands above is a quarter, not a dime. That’s inflation for you.
Welfare check
May 11, 2020
Herself chats with her mom jailhouse style,
on the phone, through a pane of glass.
We swung by the Dark Tower yesterday, bearing gifts.
Herself the Elder had requested huevos rancheros for Mothers Day. So we ordered up the takeout from Weck’s and ran it on by.
“You’re spoiled!” exclaimed a staffer. Dern tootin’. As spoiled as one can be in an assisted-living facility under lockdown in plague time, anyway.
Ain’t nothin’ a couple sacks of mulch and a cat statue can’t fix.
Afterward we continued a ongoing backyard-cleanup project. I’m a lifelong asthmatic with a personal, portable plague of allergies, the most severe of which is to yardwork.
But the space was starting to look like a tumbledown Tinkertoy tower of rusty playground equipment, a bullet-riddled ’63 Rambler American on blocks, and a three-legged pit bull with bowel issues would actually constitute improvements.
So, yeah. Yardwork.
Up north, where the yards are 35 acres, my man Hal forwards a Colorado Public Broadcasting piece about how gig workers there — including him — are getting the runaround from the plague-jiggered unemployment system, such as it is.
“This is exactly what happened to me when I applied,” he said. “I apparently need to call there. But of course cannot get through.”
Well, you can always get through here, bub. What’s going on out there in Greater Dogpatch? Are you digging holes and filling them in again? Redistributing wealth? Fetching takeout to shut-ins? As the Year of the Plague drags on toward Memorial Day, we want to hear how our readers are getting by. Wag your tales in comments.
Folklure
March 15, 2020
Never stand when you can sit; never sit when you can sprawl.
OK, folks, just because we can, let’s take the temperature (rimshot) of the audience.
How are all y’all dealing with The Plague?
Here, Miss Mia Sopaipilla is banking Z’s because, hey, you never know when you’ll need to be well-rested.
Herself is business as usual at La Fábrica de Bombas — as far as we know, anyway, because classified classified classified.
And I, of course, remain in my secure location at The Compound, at the helm of my globe-spanning multimedia Cirque du So Lame, which would sound funnier if I weren’t so lame.
There’s leftover oven-baked chicken and chili con carne in the ’fridge, fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, and the makings of a variety of vegetarian soups, stews and pasta dishes in the cupboards. We are well stocked with coffee, tea, and wine, but low on fake beer, which is not an issue as nobody ever got the DTs from a lack of fake beer.
And can you believe it? We have toilet paper. Didn’t need to wipe out (heh) a Costco to get it, either. When that runs out we’ll print mugshots of Il Douche and use those, mailing them to the Orange House afterward.
But enough about us. What’s up with you? Sound off in comments.
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