Dave’s not here … but Cheech is

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

“The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture and Industry?”

“Are you for real?” you ask.

“Does Howdy Doody got wooden balls, man?” I reply.

It’s no joke, ese — the vato loco half of Cheech & Chong has been collecting Chicano art for years, and soon some of it will be on display at a former public library in Riverside, Calif.

According to The New York Times, Cheech has already donated 11 works and plans to donate 500 more once storage is built for them. His holdings have been on display at more than 50 museums in the United States and in Europe.

Says Cheech: “We are going to make Riverside and the Riverside Art Museum the center of Chicano art in the world. And we’re going to bring the world to Riverside.”

Orrrrrrale, homes. No word yet on whether Sgt. Stedenko will be tasked with guarding the collection.

• Y tambien: Right next door in Orange County, Gustavo Arellano writes about “the agony and stupidity that is the coronavirus in Southern California.” And he passes along a new portmanteau of which I had not heard: “pandejo,” a combination of “pandemic” and “pendejo.”

Nocturnal emissions

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
The view from the guest bedroom at 5:34 a.m.

“It’s a winter wonderland!” Herself sang as I flung open the bedroom door, growling like an elderly bear, a hitch in my gitalong after a night of imperfect sleep.

Son of a bitch. Right again. No wonder they pay her the big bucks.

Happily, neither of us has to take our chances on the Duke City streets this fine frosty morning. Herself continues to work from home in Year Two of the Plague, and I am a senior citizen on a fixed income who doesn’t have to do jack shit other than sit on his arse, bitching about this and that, while waiting for Uncle Sugar to give with the free money.

I’ve seen two fine auto crashes in the past two days. The first was on Tramway near Comanche; a Honda Element and some other vehicle came to grief in the southbound lanes as I was cycling northward on Sunday. The second ate up two northbound lanes on Juan Tabo near Lomas on Monday, as I was taking the Fearsome Furster in for an emissions check and re-registration.

The  emissions tester was a man unhappy in his work, probably because he was freezing his nuts off in his tiny shed, which let the bitter southeastern wind roll in with each customer. Nevertheless, he and the State conspired to rob me of a couple hundy for the dubious privilege of courting death on the mean streets of the Land of Enchantment in a 16-year-old rice grinder, and then we were both in a bad mood.

I won’t take my brand-new sticker out for a spin today, thanks all the same. We have already established that my neighbors can’t keep the shiny side up on a sunny day, and I’ve just paid in advance for two years’ worth of happy motoring.

Anyway, it’s cold out there. Colder than a gut-shot bitch wolf dog with nine sucking pups pulling a number-four trap up a hill in the dead of winter in the middle of a snowstorm with a mouth full of porcupine quills. …

R.I.P., Claude Bolling

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Not just another jazz album.

Damn, I don’t know how I managed to overlook Claude Bolling’s departure. He and Jean-Pierre Rampal helped spark my interest in jazz way back when.

I got in by way of what they called “fusion” — outfits like The Crusaders, Weather Report, Pat Metheny Group, Return to Forever;  individuals like Stanley Turrentine and Grover Washington Jr.; and so on.

Some classical and jazz purists turned up their snoots at this sort of thing, but I loved it. Being a flutist of sorts myself I instantly found a connection with the Bolling-Rampal collaboration, right down to the whimsical cartoon album covers.

Bolling himself seemed to have a playful nature, and he resisted attempt to categorize what he was doing musically.

Mr. Bolling’s compositions were sometimes described as “combining” jazz and classical music, but he had a different view.

“I don’t like the word ‘combination,’” he said in 1982 in an interview for The Syracuse New Times, a weekly paper. “This is simply a dialogue between two kinds of music. I have made nothing new. This has been going on for a long time.”

His music will do likewise, no matter what the snobs say.

Go tell it on the mountain

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Yoo hoo … anybody home up there?

Here we go again, up into the high country where the gods hang their magic sombreros.

This time we’re in Pat O’B country, Cochise County, Arizona; specifically, the Dragoon Mountains, where the Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise bunkered up in the final years of his struggle against the white man in general and the U.S. Army in particular.

Ken Layne of Desert Oracle Radio takes us there, not by flying saucer, but in search of same. Climb aboard, and buckle up — there may be more than gold and the ghosts of Apache guerrilla fighters in them thar hills.

The sky’s the limit

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
And the skies are not cloudy all day? Where’s the fun in that?

My man Hal Walter hasn’t been writing a ton lately. But when he settles down to it, he does a job of work.

His latest can be found over at Substack, a platform that helps free-range weirdos like Hal and me crank out whatever for a small fee. But you needn’t reach for your wallet quite yet — you can have a look around without signing up for a newsletter subscription.

I’m not certain that email newsletters are the way to go. Not for me, anyway. Unlike Hal, I’m fairly comfortable with the WordPress platform, and I’m not really interested in trying to make money off this little one-ring circus of mine.

Anyway, does anyone really need another newsletter cluttering up the in-box? That’s pretty much all I get anymore, or so it seems. I have to scroll a long way down the in-box to find an email from an actual human being.

Hal’s Substack presence is very much a work in progress — at the moment, it’s a blog without the email newsletter. But while you’re waiting on the mail, you might pop round to see what he’s nailed to the wall.