caleb walker

the effing christmas spirit

Hi. Welcome to my first post-NaBloPoMo post. Just two days afterward. Not too shabby.

I'm certainly not ready for any spirit of any holiday variety yet, but A Christmas Duel has me moving in that direction very quickly. It's sung by The Hives and Cindy Lauper, and it reveals to me that I really like Christmas songs that drop the f-bomb.

the tunes

Last night I made Manhattans for KR and me. We drank them while she prepared food for Thanksgiving dinner and I read to her from the op-ed columns in the New York Times. As we became inebriated we started spewing political nonsense and ended up cursed George Bush and Dick Cheney and after we finished our first we decided to have another half-Manhattan each. So I made them and we drank them as our lentil-soup leftovers warmed up. After we ate I put KR to bed then came to the computer to look again at the website work I'd been hammering away at all day. I put the earbuds in and started iTunes. Here are the songs that came up on the random play: "Gotta Have You" by The Weepies, "Say What You Want" by Texas, and "The Piano Has Been Drinking" by Tom Waits ("The piano has been drinking, my necktie is asleep. And the combo went back to NY. The jukebox has to take a leak.") and I realize I couldn't have picked myself a better bunch of songs to hear drunk.

drive-in jam

Jonathan Coulton was, I guess, recently in Seattle and put together a series of videos of his adventures. I haven't been watching them, but I did skim through #4 (here it is). In it he and his two friends are eating burgers at a little drive-in diner when a car alarm goes off (skip ahead to 5:40:00) and he and his buddies (along with the couple at the order window) start jamming along with it. Best thing I've seen all day.

Jonathan Coulton comes to Pittsburgh this summer. Uh, wait. He was here and gone. Damn.

most heard songs

Kottke's wondering what the most-played songs on my iTunes are.

1. (26) "The Story" by Brandi Carlile

2. (16 - tie) "Moonchild" by Cibo Matto
"Katjusha" by Leningrad Cowboys

3. (15 - tie) "Another Travelin' Song" by Bright Eyes
"A Good Start" by Maria Taylor
"Common People" by William Shatner

4. (14 - tie) "Blinded By the Light" (the Live in Dublin version) by Bruce Springsteen & The Sessions Band
"Sing" by Travis

5. (13 - tie) "A History Of Lovers" by Calexico / Iron & Wine
"A Little Something" by Crash Test Dummies
"See the World" by Gomez
"Funnyman" by KT Tunstall
"Coyotes" by Richard Thompson
"Hail To Whatever You Found In The Sunlight That Surrounds You" by Rilo Kiley

a two-hour brush with history

We don't get out very often, but tonight KR and I went to see Roger McGuinn at a Calliope concert. He told a lot of stories involving Bobby Darin, Judy Collins, Gram Parsons, David Crosby, Bob Dylan, and others I don't know, essentially telling us the history of rock music through the 60s.

He started one like this: "One time Dylan was in the studio with us when we were rehearsing." Not everybody can begin a story that way. It demands that you drop what you're doing and listen up. Dylan asked what song they had just played and Roger had to tell him it was one of Dylan's own songs. He hadn't recognized it because Roger had played it with a "Beatles beat." That was Roger's secret to success: take a folky song and play it like The Beatles would.

At one point something caught the corner of my eye and I turned to see what it was. As I was trying to figure out what I had seen I thought, you know, Roger McGuinn is playing Tambourine Man, 12-string Rickenbacker jingle-jangling away, and I realized that what had distracted me was of relative insignificance compared to what was happening on stage.

Next he played Turn Turn Turn and, though I'm not really a singer-alonger, I sang along because when Roger McGuinn tells you to sing along you'd better damn well sing along because, come on, how many more opportunities are you going to get to sing Turn Turn Turn along with Roger McGuinn? The whole night felt like a two-hour brush with history.

nablopomo post #25: a lame one

The Regent Square movie theater re-opened yesterday after a week off. I guess they were entitled to a break after the Three Rivers Film Festival. Today we went to see My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about a four-year-old girl who paints abstract-expressionist paintings. Or does she? We're never told one way or another, but regardless, it still upsets my stomach to recall how the media and the gallery own treated her and her family.

Then we had dinner at the house of a friend who, we learned, had never heard Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell until this year when someone gave her Bat out of Hell: Live with the Melbourne Symphony. Wow. Bombastic Rock made even more bombastic. Awesome. Next on the stereo was Tom Waits. Even more awesomer. KR and our friend did yoga positions on the floor. We ate ice cream and pretzels for dessert. A good time was had by all.

happy birthday, robert

As I sit at my laptop computer, eating a bowl of Flax Plus Raisin Bran from Trader Joe's, I read this:

Today is believed to be the birthday of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi (1911). We know very little about his life. He's been so mythologized that he's become almost a character out of a folktale. The only reason we know for sure he existed is that in 1937 he recorded 29 of his songs over the course of two recording sessions. He had two photographs taken of himself around the same time. Those were the only recordings he made and the only photographs taken of him in his lifetime, and he died the following year, at the age of 27.

(Via The Writer's Almanac.)

The legend says that Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads and from him learned how to play the blues guitar.

But this morning I find it most interesting that so little is known about him. These days you've got to intentionally hide yourself from being recorded. Birth and death certificates bookend everyone's life, then you've got all your driver's licenses, school and employment records, your blogs and emails and forum entries, your calls recorded for quality assurance, your security camera images, your ATM PINs, your credit card purchases, and blah blah and blah, ad nauseum. Good for you, Robert Johnson, being famous for making absolutely everything you left behind memorable.

who's that guy?

The other day Ze Frank, who is winding up The Show, the only video blog worth watching every day, featured a bearded guy playing awesome covers of Ze's songs. Who's that guy?

Today I happened to click to The Merlin Show at 43 Folders, which featured a bearded guy talking about becoming a "true person." Hey, isn't that the guy from Ze's Show?

The Show kindly links to the guy's site. He is a singer-songwriter named, it seems, Jonathan Coulton. From his site you can listen to and buy his music. While poking around in his podcast archives I see that he's the creator of the Flickr video, which is one of the best things ever put on the internet. Turns out I posted the video to the Caleb Walker short bits over a year ago.

happy birthday, tom

According to The Writer's Almanac, today is the birthday of Tom Waits. I first heard Mr. Waits in the summer of 1981 working at a summer camp.

My friend John played Waits on the turntable in the Retreat Center, one of the few buildings hooked up to the electrical generator. It was probably the Heart of Saturday Night album he played, the cover of which frightened me. But the voice, the gritty subject matter, and the story that John told me about Tom fascinated me.

He told me that Tom Waits was homeless and went into the studio to record an album when the money from the last one ran out. It seemed a plausible story, based only on the voice and the photos and my own stereotypes. Of course I find no evidence of that being true, but it really launched my interest in Waits.

xmas music mix

I just found (via Boing Boing) SomaFM's Xmas in Frisko radio feed. It includes some rude, foul-mouthed Christmas cheer. Right now I'm listening to Bob Rivers' "White Trash Christmas":

I'm dreamin' of a white trash Christmas
We'll decorate the mobile home
There'll be cousin's kissin'
And front teeth missin'
And you'll hear grandpa peein' in the snow

And now there's a very Jesus-y soul song. And now something called "Honky the Christmas Goose." Weird mix, this.