Not even Shane MacGowan could. So don’t you lot even try. Someone’s built their dreams around ye. And a Merry Christmas to all of yis.
Category: Music that doesn’t suck
On the first day of Zappadan …
… I bought a fresh digital copy of “Over-Nite Sensation” to replace the one I had in college.
No, not the bigger-and-better, new-and-improved version. The original, you slime. Do I look like I’m wearing a Sears poncho?
Don’t worry — I got a little something for you, too: Daniel Felsenthal’s look back at Zappa and that album over at The Atlantic.
Felsenthal calls “Over-Nite Sensation” Zappa’s “most inviting listen, forging a muscular, funk-inflected sound that couches the denseness of his more avant-garde music in pop hooks. … The album’s lyrics made a cutting statement about the flimsy values of its time — and the songs themselves were a tightly wound coil of Zappa’s musical ideas.”
You gotta love anyone who posits that Zappa’s long hair and beard resembled a fermata. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with dirty love, you preverts — it’s a symbol of musical notation.
I have good news and bad news
It’s a very Irish sort of day here in The Duck! City, gray and gloomy with a steady drizzle, just the ticket for observing the departure of Shane MacGowan.
He was just 65. But as Jerry Jeff Walker is reputed to have said to an elder, “You’re older than I am, but I’ve been up more hours.” By that reckoning MacGowan may have rivaled Mel Brooks’s 2,000-Year-old Man.
I have the two classic Pogues albums, “Rum Sodomy & the Lash,” produced by Elvis Costello, and “If I Should Fall From Grace With God.”
Every Christmas Eve Herself and I dance in the living room to “Fairytale of New York.” I have never been moved to dance to one of Henry Kissinger’s bleak, self-aggrandizing dirges.
However, I’m happy to let the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain dance a whipsong on Kissinger’s grave. Here’s a passage from his 2001 book “A Cook’s Tour,” forwarded by Hal Walter:
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia—the fruits of his genius for statesmanship—and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”
For more of that sort of eulogy, see the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog. I’d give a pretty to see Zombie Hunter S. Thompson arise from the grave and pick up where Bourdain and LG&M leave off. You may recall HST’s Rolling Stone obit for Richard Nixon.
• Late update: Charles P. Pierce also has a few thoughts, as you might expect.
Blank Friday
Another Thanksgiving feast has come and gone (though leftovers aplenty remain) and here it is Blank Friday already and I haven’t snapped up a single solitary bargain, not one.
Herself had requested Emeril Lagasse’s chicken cacciatore for dinner, and I decided to add the traditional accompaniment, Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash.
Somewhere along The Path for reasons unknown we got detoured into butter-cookie construction, and as a consequence I was a wee bit tardy getting started on my own preparations, which are extensive.
These dishes are not complex — the succotash needs just four minutes in the wok — but they involve more than a few ingredients, among them Emeril’s Essence, a spice mix with eight components.
The cacciatore itself has 20 more. The succotash? Eleven. Many cups and bowls for the mise en place, many, many of them.
For the cookery I needed a large Dutch oven, a pasta pot, and a wok. Knives, spatulas, spoons, graters, cutting boards, colander, oven mitts, rubber gloves, yadda yadda yadda. Clean as you go, etc. Stand back, gimme room, and so on.
A memory with fewer holes in it would have been nice, too. For some reason I had it in my head that the simmering phase of the cacciatore would last only 20 minutes, which was 40 minutes short of actuality. This put a slight hitch in my culinary gitalong and thus we were late sitting down to the actual eating, which annoyed Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who is a stickler for schedules (her own).
Didn’t matter. We’d lunched on eggs over medium and pan-fried potatoes, so we weren’t drooling and ravenous. We didn’t have two-legged guests waiting, growing surly with drink, reawakened memories of past slights, and plans for vengeance. And we didn’t have to drive home afterward.
During the final cleanup, which was extensive, we sang along with Arlo, singing loud to end war and stuff. We hope yous all did likewise. There’s a lot of it about.
We’re just waiting for it to come around. …
It ain’t a dump, and it ain’t closed on Thanksgiving, and you can’t get anything you want.
Still, it’d be a friendly gesture if you took all the garbage down to the city dump, starting with that big orange sack of shit that keeps stinking up the church, downstairs where the pews used to be in.
And remember, if you want to end war and stuff, you got to sing loud.
Might not hurt to recite the Haudenosaunee address of gratitude, either. Props to Charles P. Pierce for showing us the way. For more on the Six Nations, a.k.a. Iroquois Confederacy, click here.
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