Thursday, February 26, 2015
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Where Have You Gone, Nurse Goodbody?
We're tryin'. |
Original Hee Haw performer Gordie Tapp—70 at the time of this report—comments on the ushering out of aging female cast members: "They're now 45 and 48, and ladies that age are beginning to show their age, and it's very difficult for women." He adds, "I don't know what it is about television, it seems to enhance men, but it's deathly on women. Some of our gals had reached that stage." Accurate, sure, Tapp's observations are culturally tone-deaf in 21st Century terms, all the more telling for Tapp's willingness to speak the truth as he sees it.
Poor Sam Lovullo, longtime Hee Haw producer. He looks the picture of dubious confidence as he speaks; he doesn't really believe the change is gonna work, but what can you do? Watch him at the end: "Our replacements are...fresh. They're...good." Pause. "And certainly they're ideal for what we need in our new show."
Hard swallow.
The overhaul didn't take. The Hee Haw Show was cancelled within a year.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Hank Thompson's At The Bar. Last Call.
From 1969's Smoky The Bar.
Friday, February 20, 2015
#SpringTraining #NoWaiting
Observers often comment on the nature of time in baseball: there's no game clock; a contest is theoretically infinite; a half-inning may last one minute or thirty; plate appearances are endless games-within-the-game. Time is collapsing in on baseball in many ways, it seems to me, as the clock is being rendered obsolete (or at least a nuisance) in much of contemporary culture. Take Spring Training. Pitchers and catchers are arriving as I write—the frisson of delight that brings me renewed easily—and soon full squads will assemble, split up, stretch in the sun, take infield and batting practice, and slowly resume playing games, suspended since October. When I was a kid, this March assemblage felt virtually mythic with a capital "M," as if out of some imagined master narrative—I knew that teams were gathering somewhere in the South, Southwest, and the West, but the only proof I had was the infrequent grainy black-and-white photographs in the Washington Post or Star. Baseball didn't really begin until Opening Day, when the bunting and sunshine and the bright white uniforms (of the Orioles, my home-team-by-default) heralded the return of the game and, soon but never soon enough, summer. Baseball felt bound by the calendar in very real and irrevocable ways. The season schedule was only printed on paper, and not always easy to find. March was black and white. April was green. The boundary between the two was thick. (For some terrific photos of those old March days, look here.)
Well, I can always imagine #October.
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Toronto Blue Jays at their inaugural Spring Training in Dunedin, Florida, 1977. Just as I would've imagined. (Photo via Torontoist.) |
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Lydia Fakundiny on the Art of the Essay
Say you are wandering—without a map, because no satisfactory one comes to hand—in what you believe to be a neighborhood. Wandering about, you come to know it and locate yourself in it only as you keep on traversing it. Here is a fire station, a corner drugstore, a spot of green space, a row of turreted Victorian homes, a canal. As you pass and repass any one of these landmarks, you see where you are in relation to all the others; you map the place out as a neighborhood. Note: it is your own movement that brings into being the map that tells you what kind terrain you are in. Your orientation is of your own making. You know where you are by having gone there.
So it is with coming to understand the essay as a genre, a way of writing prose…; so it is, too, with any solitary effort to work through some particular essay, whether your own or someone else’s. Essays discover themselves in the writing. (I am not the first to remark that even when you try, in any concentrated fashion, to talk about the essay, you will more than likely find yourself composing one; essay, it seems, insist on being thought about only in essays.)
…
Essay writing becomes a means for training one’s capacity to be in two places at once: both doing and watching. You attend to your worldly business, its deadlines and disorders, while absorbed in the peculiarly human work of speculating—observing, reflecting, seeing how it is and could be. The essay claims no authority but that of life lived under such scrutiny, meaning, in the long run, self-scrutiny.
…
The essay is “personal” because it is in my every movement on paper that “I” come into being and, thereby, exist for my reader. I can’t, as I said before, describe, let alone prescribe, where we’re going; your own eyes will tell you. The reader, too, must get the habit of responsiveness. A reader of essays learns to listen for “the first person…speaking,” to hear the “I” pushing to become “we”—pushing toward something like a mutuality of personhood, a conversation between friends, equals. Reading an essay is not a feat of information—gathering; it is not like running down to the corner store for a quart of milk. It is following the motions and paces of another mind, alert and open to whatever they reveal. Reading essays and writing them have this in common: either way you must “know how to take a walk.” The art of it is one of the great pleasures a person can cultivate.
Friday, February 13, 2015
Hank Thompson's At The Bar
Here are three from 1968's On Tap, In The Can, Or In The Bottle: "I could drink to the times when I was happy / But here's a toast to my misery." That old story. More comin', so stay tuned.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
“There is no such thing...
...as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others." William Faulkner, who also contributed the name of this blog.
Friday, February 6, 2015
The Fleshtones @ 9:30 Club, 1983/84
A loud Super Rock cheers to photographer Jimmy Cohrssen who's unearthed these terrific photos he snapped of The Fleshtones' Peter Zaremba, Keith Streng, co-founding member Marek Pakulski, and the late great Gordon Spaeth, hanging out downstairs, and then playing onstage, at 9:30 Club in Washington D.C..
I was quite likely at this show; it could have been the first time I saw the band. The year's 1983 or '84: Washington's "old downtown" was still old, and the rat-infested, crack-harmed neighborhood around the 9:30 Club was still rough and tough. President Reagan was at home in bed a few blocks away. Have you heard the American Sound?
I was quite likely at this show; it could have been the first time I saw the band. The year's 1983 or '84: Washington's "old downtown" was still old, and the rat-infested, crack-harmed neighborhood around the 9:30 Club was still rough and tough. President Reagan was at home in bed a few blocks away. Have you heard the American Sound?
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Peter Zaremba |
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Keith Streng |
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Streng's Mustang |
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Streng and Zaremba, downstairs |
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Gordon Spaeth |
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Spaeth |
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Marek Pakulski |
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Pakulski in Recovery Mode (or: If That Couch Could Talk) |
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Zaremba |
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Monday, February 2, 2015
There's A Game On
I'll take only a tense and satisfyingly-resolved match-up between a hot slugger and a kid just up from AAA, an anxious conference on the mound in the eighth inning among the infielders, alert to the changes in the situation with the guy now on second, a refined pitcher's duel, a loud bases-clearing triple in the sixth that changes everything. I don't need a half-hour, real-time promotional kit. I know, I know, how boring.
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