From Pascagoula to Holly Springs and a lot of in between.
Usually I spend my time in the car turning the dial trying to find Brittany and Pink songs...or searching in vain for the rowdy preacher I once heard in L'usiana. He was givin' a sermon on sess and pawnografry. He got so fired up describing his former wicked ways that he completely lost track of his Amens and Hallalujahs ...
"I read yo Playboys magazeems, AMEEEEEEEEENS...and yo prenthouses Halllujjjhaaaaa!!!"
In South Louisiana I can pick up Catholic radio programs (not too many of those in my neck of the woods) which are interesting...don't usually hear a lot of discussion on transubstantiation...or hear well reasoned arguments against birth control. I spent an hour once listening to a fella explain how the prohibition against birth control was not a ban on casual hanky-panky within marriage.
I heard Hunka Burnin Love twice last week...with a steering wheel in your hand, that's livin'.
I love the radio but, sometimes I need a break from it...I can only turn the dial on With or Without You, Sweet Emotion and Tom Sawyer so many times before wanting to punch it...screaming about a conspiracy to ruin my road trips.
So sometimes I bring CDs...zip into the office here at the house and grab a few off the shelf without much thought. This time I saw a familiar pink cover and sitting on top of it was this....
I don't know how I feel about Captain Beefheart as Captain Beefheart...there are moments of blues brilliance like the above, pure genius and then there's weirdness for the sake of being weird...like I rapped the vegetable satellite with a chocolate covered cue stick...or whatever. It just seems so contrived...or worse desperate to be different. Then there's the voice...I don't know if an intimate familiarity with Howlin' Wolf makes it better or worse...sometimes it sounds like a brilliant reinterpretation. Sometimes it sounds worse than George Thourogood doing One Bourbon One Scotch...
All that's not much of an issue here. Safe as Milk is a transition record and there's plenty of fuzzed out straight up R&B left on it to get past some awkward moments...and its got Ry Cooder.
Fantastic record and it'll have me breakin' out The Make Up by next week...
Hey Don...and Frank...especially you Frank...that's what truely strange imagery sounds like.
Next up the pink one...it deserves its own post.
Decent Radio seems to have died on its ass over here, it gets relegated to more and more obscure BBC digital stations. Still, I get more and more bored listening to music these days, I often stick with a book on tape.
ReplyDeleteAlso we have cancellled our BBC license at home, which mean £145 a year saving, and not TV or RAdion in our house. Next update will be how we are turning the backgarden into a vegetable plot, keeping pigs in the garage and changing our names to Tom and Barabara. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/goodlife/)
On another note Diesel is now £9 a gallon... and petrol closer a £10. I hear a lot of 'we wouldn't stand for it' but actuall, its made me realise how utterly powerless we are if there is something all politcal parties do.
Just back from the USA, and fulfilled a cliché ambition of driving across the desert in a convertible listening to a fire-and-brimstone preacher on the radio. But bloody hell, there was some terrible Country stuff around. As my Dad would have said, 'boys oh boys oh boys'.
ReplyDeleteGlad you made it back safe and sound.
ReplyDeleteI drove through the desert once (Navaho Nation in New Mexico)...probably as exotic and unique an experience for me as it was for you. I live in the exact opposite of a desert and probably closer to Brighton than I am California.
What's been done to country music in the last 30 years is maybe the greatest crime of the 20th century.
Adam the radio landscape is completely unruly over here...I think there's more stations than dials.
We're paying around 3.70 a gallon...2 pound 30 or so...like the rent it's "too d***n high."
ReplyDeleteApropos the End of the World - from the Washington Post on the non-appearance of The Rapture:
ReplyDelete“I can’t tell you what I feel right now,” he said, surrounded by tourists. “Obviously, I haven’t understood it correctly because we’re still here.”
Many followers said the delay was a further test from God to persevere in their faith.
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One of the various forms of reasoning you learn about in Philosophy 101 is induction, roughly speaking, “because it happened yesterday it will happen tomorrow”. Hume put this down to habit. Habit seems an odd justification for one's belief in that it would appear to be merely a matter of ritual. Hume used this sceptical stance towards inductive reasoning to undermine the notion of a miracle: because two or more events may regularly be observed to occur together, we should not necessarily assume there's a causal relation – because you pray for something and it happens does not mean the two events are connected.
But there's a flip-side to induction dubbed “counter induction” (sometimes know as “time for a change”) and that counter-claim questions the complacency of the former by suggesting that, just because you have regularly observed a set of events occurring together in the past, does not mean they will continue to occur together in the future; in fact, chances are – like getting twelve on ten consecutive throws of two dice - one would expect the increased probability of a different outcome.
While the end-of-the-worlders are clearly whack jobs, they do raise a point (more by accident than “design”) – upon what reason does our belief that the world will continue tomorrow rest? We know what their reasoning on its ending: dubious maths and interpretation of scriptures; however, upon what does our counter belief that it will continue to exist rest? It is insufficient to point out the paucity of the other's belief as a basis for the correctness of one's own.
There are few things I love more than unexpected observation.
ReplyDeleteI don't care how obviously dumb something is...I get sick to the point of anxiety from hearing the same thoughts over and over again.
Thanks