'Best of TBH Politoons'
Baron Dave Romm
The Folk Process 2007 II
By Baron Dave Romm
Shockwave Radio Theater podcasts
"Celtic" or "Country" or "Odd"
Music is everywhere. Despite the rise of low-quality mp3s available on the internet and DVDs replacing MTV for watching recorded music, that basic idea of listening to a high-quality sound recording is still the baseline for audio. As I talked about last week, easily affordable recorded music has been at hand for little more than a century.
Here are three CDs from disparate sources: One was handed to me after I saw them in concert, one was sent at my request when I heard a track on a sampler album, and one came out of the blue from someone who thought I was weird enough to appreciate it. While each of these will have to fall into a marketing category to be placed in the proper record store shelf, all of them stretch the boundaries of their genre.
3 Pints Gone
Auld Lang Syne: The New Favorites of 3 Pints Gone is the result of remixing old tracks, producing live tracks, and some new releases. I know 3 Pints Gone, based in Wisconsin, from their concerts and filking at Minneapolis science fiction conventions, such as this one from the 2007 Convergence, which also served as a release party for the new CD. They've always given a fun, high-energy, half-drunken concert, and it's about time they produced an album that takes advantage of their experience and craft.
As you might expect from the name, 3 Pints Gone will be in the Irish/Celtic section, with heavy emphasis on drinking songs. *hic* Renaissance Festivals are their natural habitat. While there are live cuts on the CD, this is not a concert album, with the majority of the songs being remixes of previous releases. Which needed the remixing. The group has four other CDs, but this is the one to get.
The title song, "Auld Lang Syne", is giving a spirited celtic treatment, very different from the dewy-eyed New Year's ballad. 3 Pints Gone does very well with non-traditional covers of traditional songs; at least I haven't encountered them arranged quite this way. "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye", the anti-war song which I mostly know as Steeleye Span's "Fighting for Strangers", gets a good a cappella rendition. "Away Rio" keeps its sea chanty roots. A woman dressing as a man to be a sailor looking for her impressed love is a common theme in celtic songlore, and "Willie Taylor" is a upbeat version of a downbeat song.
A more recent song is based on a true story. As British forces were being evacuated from Dunkirk in June 1940, the 51st Highland Division was fighting a rear-guard holding action at St. Valery, waiting for an evacuation order that never came. The Dunkirk retreat was a strategic and PR success, but those that didn't make it out did not share in the glory.
When I returned at the end of the war,An understated, emotional ballad.
From the Stalag where I'd been confined,
I read of the battles the allies had fought,
Stalingrad, Alamein, and the Rhine.
And with pride in their hearts people spoke of Dunkirk
Where defeat had become victory
But nobody mentioned that Highland Division.
They'd never heard of St.Valery
Many of their songs about war or coming home from war, far more than drinking songs. All songs have been honed by experience and many have wonderful harmonies. 3 Pints Gone has been around for a while, and Auld Lang Syne squeezes every drop out of them. If you like traditional Celtic songs in the Tommy Makem/Irish Rovers style, then you'll like how 3 Pints Gone builds on traditional arrangements for their versions. Recommended, with many of the 21 cuts being iPw. If you like this CD, you can fill in your collection with the others, but you'll like their concerts better.
Chris Stuart & Backcountry
Mojave River by Chris Stuart and Backcountry could be filed under Bluegrass or Americana, but for the moment it's in my Country section. The harmonies and the driving banjo are the deciding factor. Sounding like The Rooftop Singers on a country station, all the songs are well done and, like 3 Pints Gone, show their traditional roots while bold arrangements make unique versions.
The CD opens with a rousing rendition of Townes Van Zandt's Dollar Bill Blues (the only song they didn't write), which sets the tone. The tale of drink, gambling and whoring will keep your toes a-tappin' with several good lead breaks letting the band members strut their stuff. He's an outlaw, but she's an outlaw too, and she teaches him "love is a poor man's pride" when she leaves him high and dry in the desert, the dry "Mojave River" as metaphor for lost love. Much of their lyrics are metaphor and/or allusion, with almost ethereal harmonies. "Rider On This Train" is a slow, sad and luminescent ballad of man who lost everything when his woman died, sort of a New Country take on "Oh My Darling Clementine".
A little girl doesn't understand death in "Don't Throw Mama's Flowers Away", a bittersweet bluegrass take. I'm not entirely sure what "Sin Stealer" is about, but I'm going to hazard a guess that it's about a guy who feels so down he doesn't want to be forgiven, preferring to wallow in his many vices than be forgiven by G_d. I can relate.
"Buttermilk Pie" is frisky and silly. "The Jealous Crow" desires the beauty of a young woman. "Time Was" is a country reminiscence of times that have passed on.
Mojave River is an excellent original country album, crafted finely enough for traditionalists and complex enough for those (like me) who only wade into New Country waters. Recommended for any who appreciate the genre, with several iPw songs.
Steve Kilpatrick
Westside Crop Circles by Steve Kilpatrick is not a new CD and I'm not sure of it's availability, but I'm going to talk about it anyway. Self published, so if you ask nicely maybe he'll burn you a copy. It's an odd, jazzy affair that sends some reviewers into a tizzy of scarlet prose. Me? I liked it.
"Brothers-in-Law" could fit in a Country format or New Age, with the earthy subject matter of him preferring his sister's first husband more than the current one. "Conjugal Visit" is all about the preparation for one; a country theme, I suppose, with electric guitar and a driving beat, though I doubt many Country stations would agree. I like "Rough & Tough", an odd little arrangement of an odd little song:
She's lying on the bed rolling side to sideThe other end of the kid is taken care of in "Adjustments", about breastfeeding (from a woman's POV, though Steve sings it). Meanwhile, "Me & The Bank" co-own the car, women coast to coast burst into tears when "Bruno the Neighborhood Lovegod" gets married, she runs off leaving "Me & Oprah, My Pajamas and the Pain" and a "Worried Mind" insists that God broke into his place and stole his stuff including the porn.
Soon enough of her eyes will open wide
None have ever earned a love more divine
but something in the air tells me that it's time
She's rough and tough and hard to diaper
Her flying hostile feet kick out at the air
Gnarled fists glance off everywhere
Musically, Westside Crop Circles is hard to place, though the country and folk influences are evident. I'll probably put in in my Filk/Weird Music section, though it isn't filk or Dementia Music in the Weird Al/great Luke Ski sense of the term. Kilpatrick isn't writing jokes or parodies, he's creating odd situations and looking at them from a skewed perspective. If he were a comedian, he'd be Stan Laurel. If he were a crop circle, he'd be an unusual sighting in the west side burbs.
Too good to be placed in my weasely Acquired Tastes category, I still can't give Westside Crop Circles an unqualified recommendation. If you, too, look at the tilted world, then you will appreciate Steve's view of life as it marches by without understanding. I suspect that many of my readers fall into this vortex, and want to point out one of the eddies in your stream of consciousness.
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia who produces Shockwave Radio Theater, writes in a Live Journal demi-blog, plays with a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. Dave Romm reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E. Podcasts of Shockwave Radio Theater. Permanent archive. More radio programs, interviews and science fiction humor plays can be accessed on the Shockwave Radio audio page.
Thanks to everyone who has sent me music to play on the air.
--////
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
CARLIN ROMANO: Are Sacred Texts Sacred? the Challenge for Atheists (chronicle.com)
Religion, writes Hitchens, "does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one. This is only to be expected. It is, after all, wholly man-made."
Interview With Melissa Etheridge (afterellen.com)
AE: ... who do you support for the Democratic nomination right now?
ME: You know what? It's funny because people would ask me that and I'd say, "Oh my God, anybody!" Give me a Democrat dog - I don't care. Just anything is better than this hellhole that we're in now. But when I really look at it, and especially after the process of that forum - I am a Democrat, and I will support whomever my party nominates for president and vice president. I will absolutely, whole-heartedly, all my heart and soul support them, whether it be Clinton, Obama, Edwards - whatever it is.
Linda Villarosa: "Outside the Lines: Babes in Momland" (afterellen.com)
Like most lesbian moms, I'm often asked some version of this question: Did you have your kids? After I say "yes," the frequent follow up is, "Um, er, if you don't mind my, uh, asking - how?"
Brandon Voss: Miss Cleo Still Knows (advocate.com)
Last year the famed psychic told us she was a lesbian; this year she has a new CD. She sits down with us to "read" Britney, Bush, and Obama.
Steven Frank: What Does It Take to Be a Gay Icon Today? (afterelton.com)
Gay men don't worship just anyone. Who makes the cut?
Gina DeVries: Short Interview with Bunny G., 19, founder of the Hampshire College chapter of Radical Cheerleaders, the Hampshire Hep Cats (curvemag.com)
The mainstream media says that 90 percent of the American people support the war, but I just don't think that's true. Š We went to a rally in Boston and there were 500 people there chanting for peace and justice. Š Recently we were cheering at a rally in Amherst, and a guy in a car pulled up and started yelling at us, "What would you do? Five thousand innocent people died! What would you do?" It's really hard to respond to something like that, but I asked him: "Why do more people have to die?"
Roger Ebert: When a sigh is not just a sigh
Q. In your Great Movie review of "Casablanca," you refer to Claude Rains' character as subtly homosexual. I thought that his character was portrayed as a complete, though effete, womanizer.--William Dienna, Wayne, Pa.
A. He goes through the motions with young women. He feels nothing for Ingrid Bergman. He'd say yes in a flash to Humphrey Bogart.
Roger Ebert: The Great Dictator (A Great Movie)
In 1938, the world's most famous movie star began to prepare a film about the monster of the 20th century. Charlie Chaplin looked a little like Adolf Hitler, in part because Hitler had chosen the same toothbrush moustache as the Little Tramp.
Reader Suggestion
Serendipity
Hey, Marty...
A couple wed on a Lake Michigan beach. They put their wedding vows in a bottle and threw it in the water. It is found across the lake a few weeks later. Click the WOODTV.com & WOOD TV8 - Grand Rapids news, weather, sports and video - Vows in bottle float across lake link to read '...the rest of the story'....
Serendipity
It's way cool...
BadtotheboneBob
Thanks, B2TBBob!
Hubert's Poetry Corner
BEYOND DEEP BREATHS
Dancing Princess?
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and hot.
Global Initiative At The Apollo
Bill Clinton
After getting hundreds of pledges to tackle the world's problems at his philanthropic summit this past week, former President Bill Clinton did what any good host would: He threw a party.
Music, celebrity and politics mixed Saturday night at Harlem's Apollo Theatre, where Clinton was joined by Bono, Chris Rock, Shakira and Alicia Keyes for a roundtable discussion on youth activism.
Clinton called on each young member of the audience to "be a citizen servant, a giver, because we have to have a vital society," before announcing the Clinton Global Initiative's first youth summit, called CGI U, planned for next year at Tulane University in New Orleans.
The former president and the other superstar panelists took questions from the audience before giving up the stage to performances by hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean and soulful singer Keyes.
Bill Clinton
Museum of Black World War II History
Bruce Bird
Down a dirt driveway, in one of the whitest states in the nation, is a museum dedicated to the experiences of black servicemen and women during the Second World War.
The Museum of Black World War II History is run by Bruce Bird, a white, retired factory worker who sold his home and used the proceeds to convert a two-room 19th century schoolhouse to house it. The museum, which opened in June 2006, offers display cases filled with Second World War weapons, models of tanks and aircraft and other memorabilia.
At best, it gets a handful of visitors a week.
But he's steadfast in his resolve to recognize the service and sacrifice of more than 1.1 million black servicemen and women who fought for their country in the Second World War or filled support jobs in every theatre of war while suffering the indignities of institutional racism.
"I think the museum is a great thing," said Gregory Black, a retired U.S Navy officer who runs the website blackmilitaryworld.com and has a link to the Vermont museum from his site. "I think it's something that we need. One of the things, overall, that African Americans are very disenchanted with these days, is we don't really feel appreciated. We don't feel recognized for the contributions that we've made. A lot of people have basically given up."
Bruce Bird
Attempts American Newscast
BBC
They speak English at the BBC, but CBS News veteran Rome Hartman still faced a language barrier when he was hired to create a newscast specifically for American viewers.
Almost all of the TV terms he was accustomed to were different. The American anchorman is a "presenter" at the BBC. The producer works in a "gallery," not a control room. And a voiceover is known as an OOV - an acronym for "out of vision."
Nearly four months of planning bear fruit Monday when the hourlong "BBC World News America" debuts at 7 p.m. EDT on BBC America, a network available in about half of the nation's TV homes. Parts of the newscast will also be seen on PBS stations that regularly air news material from the British Broadcasting Corp.
Matt Frei, the BBC's lead correspondent in the U.S. for the last five years, is the anchor. Oops, we mean presenter.
BBC
Show To Benefit Alma Mater
Los Lobos
Earlier this year an arson fire in the historic auditorium at Garfield High School charred almost all of the famed portraits that hung on the wall of fame.
All, that is, except for a picture of Cesar Rosas of Los Lobos.
"It's a calling," said Rosas, a member of the famed East L.A. band. "It means we're on a mission from God to try to help."
Next month Los Lobos will perform a benefit concert to raise funds for the reconstruction of the school auditorium that was gutted in the May 20 fire. The school sustained an estimated $30 million in damage.
The band, whose original four members are all Garfield graduates from the early 1970s, will headline a bill with other Chicano artists including Tierra, Little Willie G of Thee Midniters and El Chicano. The Oct. 14 event at Gibson Amphitheatre will also feature the Tex-Mex band Little Joe y La Familia and Upground.
Los Lobos
Trying To Smoke Less
George Michael
British singer George Michael is trying to reduce his consumption of marijuana, the pop star told the BBC on Sunday. "I'm constantly trying to smoke less marijuana. I'd like to take less and to a degree it's a problem," Michael told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs program.
"Is it a problem in my life? Is it getting in the way of my life? I really don't think," added Michael. "I'm a happy man and I can afford my marijuana so that's not a problem."
Michael infuriated mental health charities last year by smoking a cannabis joint during a television interview and saying, "This stuff keeps me sane and happy."
George Michael
Huge Crowds Protest U.S. Pact
Costa Rica
More than 100,000 Costa Ricans, some dressed as skeletons, protested a U.S. trade pact on Sunday they say will flood their country with cheap farm goods and cause job losses.
Chanting "No to the free-trade pact!" and "Costa Rica is not for sale!" demonstrators filled one of San Jose's main boulevards to show their opposition against the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States.
In the searing heat, some protesters wore masks of U.S. resident George W. Bush and handed out fake dollar bills, lampooning U.S. trade policies.
Costa Rica is the only country that has not ratified CAFTA -- which includes Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic -- and will be the only nation to decide the issue by referendum.
Costa Rica
Another Sex Video In Her Future?
Pamela Anderson
The stars of two of the most infamous celebrity sex videos to surface on the Internet may be headed for holy matrimony.
Onetime "Baywatch" beauty Pamela Anderson and Rick Salomon, a former boyfriend of Paris Hilton, applied for and were granted a marriage license in Las Vegas on Saturday, the syndicated TV show "Access Hollywood" has reported.
Salomon was briefly married in 2002 to actress Shannen Doherty of the TV hit "Beverly Hills, 90210," but their union was annulled.
He later "dated" Hilton in a relationship memorialized in an infamous "night-vision" sex tape that also gained wide Internet exposure before it was distributed as a porn film titled "One Night in Paris."
Pamela Anderson
Autographed Books For Charity
Harry Potter
A British charity has sold a complete set of Harry Potter books autographed by their author J.K. Rowling on e-Bay for 18,200 pounds (26,133 euros, 37,100 dollars), it said Sunday.
Bidding for the seven books on the online auction site closed at midnight (2300 GMT Saturday) after a starting offer of 100 pounds, Books Abroad development director Claire Newman told AFP.
Rowling's mother-in-law, Barbara Murray, works for the Scottish charity which supplies books to schools worldwide.
Rowling agreed to donate the books, which were stored in a local police station, as part of the charity's 25th anniversary celebrations.
Harry Potter
Ate 21 Pounds Of Grits
Pat Bertoletti
Pat Bertoletti, a mohawk-sporting chef from Chicago, gulped down 21 pounds of buttery, goopy grits in 10 minutes to win $4,000 in the first World Grits Eating Championship at Louisiana Downs on Saturday.
The grits were presented in 2-pound trays, each about 8 inches by 6 inches and 1 1/2 inches deep, said Ryan Nerz, a spokesman for Major League Eating.
Tim "Eater X" Janus of New York was second, with 20 pounds. Joey Chestnut of San Jose, Calif., who this summer ate a record-breaking 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes to become world hot dog-eating champion, finished third, polishing off 19 pounds.
Pat Bertoletti
Weekend Box Office
'Game Plan'
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson had the winning game plan at the box office. Disney's "The Game Plan," starring Johnson as a football quarterback whose bachelor lifestyle is disrupted by the arrival of a daughter he never knew he had, opened as the top weekend flick with $22.7 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "The Game Plan," $22.7 million.
2. "The Kingdom," $17.7 million.
3. "Resident Evil: Extinction," $8 million.
4. "Good Luck Chuck," $6.3 million.
5. "3:10 to Yuma," $4.2 million.
6. "The Brave One," $3.8 million.
7. "Mr. Woodcock," $3 million.
8. "Eastern Promises," $2.9 million.
9. "Sydney White," $2.7 million.
10. "Across the Universe," $2.05 million.
'Game Plan'
In Memory
Lois Maxwell
Lois Maxwell, who starred as Miss Moneypenny in 14 James Bond movies, has died, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported Sunday. She was 80.
The Canadian-born actress starred alongside Sean Connery in the first James Bond movie, "Dr. No," in 1962 as the secretary to M, the head of the secret service.
Born Lois Hooker in Ontario, Canada, in 1927, she began her acting on radio before moving to Britain with the Entertainment Corps of the Canadian army at the age of 15, the BBC said.
In the late 1940s, she moved to Hollywood and won a Golden Globe for her part in the Shirley Temple comedy "That Hagen Girl."
In addition to her 14 appearances as Miss Moneypenny, she also acted in Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita" and worked on TV shows including "The Saint," "The Baron, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)," and "The Persuaders!," the BBC said.
She was 58 when she appeared in her final Bond film, 1985's "A View To A Kill." She was replaced by 26-year-old Caroline Bliss for "The Living Daylights."
Her last film was a 2001 thriller called "The Fourth Angel," alongside Jeremy Irons.
Lois Maxwell
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