Map ref 41n 93w; or, about places in/and space.

Now that the 7" scanning frenzy has ramped down, I return, at last, to Part deux of an extended meditation brought on by the great 'Nuum debate which occurred elsewhere and was chronicled, theorized, K-punked, woebotted, and impostumed starting here at one of Simon's other places. My intervention , no really more of an extending aside, a theorizing sideswipe, will avoid almost any mention of Hardcore, dubstep, or grime except these I just made. Why? because honestly I have nothing useful to add in that direction to what has already been said before. But the more generic questions of scenes and genres are issues that have plagued my waking hours (and perhaps even some more sleeping ones) since at least 1982 AKA sophomore year in Cambridge.

Back then I wrote an extended and intricate analysis of the Preface to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (162) Surely you know it "Democritus Jr. to the Reader"? A classic case of self fashioning, self-consumptions and several forms of self abuse rolled into one tight prose ball. Yes, I basically re-created Stanley Fish's classic text on same, Self-Consuming Artifacts, which I only discovered after the paper had been returned. Herschel Baker, no slave to fashion, was kind enough not to tell me what he REALLY thought of such conceits at one of our frequent meetings in his smoky Widener carrel. I suspect he and Stan the Man must have had some titanic intellectual brawls over Milton back in the day! But then everybody forgets Fish's first book was a rather straightforward reading of John Skelton's oeuvre: John Skelton's Poetry (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965). Even the master of misdirection himself admits the banality of said book, or at least its title:

Ever since my first book, “John Skelton’s Poetry,” was misclassified by Books in Print as an edition, I have tried to come up with titles that announced (sometimes in words that were too clever by half) that the content between the covers was original and even outlandish. I think I got pretty good at it — “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing Too,” “Self-Consuming Artifacts,” “Professional Correctness,” “Is There a Text in This Class?” — but I can’t hold a candle to the headline writers of the New York Post.
—Stanley Fish, "Headline Art," The New York Times April 19, 2009.

There I go again just like the titular Don Juan off topic and away . . .

So back to the harem or at least, a contained space about/in which we can think about the meaning of the concept of "scene."

When speaking of scenes I think of metaphorical homes: musical ones, social ones, spaces and places. But we must remember after Bachelard that the scene as home is nothing but a substitute, a kind of home while still not a home. Because eventually every one leaves the scene whether for the next one, death, a new life in suburbia, or some other conversion experience.


Why are scenes so important to emergent music? And in many ways even more so to residual tones? Raymond Williams would alert us to the fact that as a dominant cultural form, certain musics don't NEED scenes to survive. they have late modern capitalism and all its inherent self-replicating systems and yet the digital bug has gotten inside the analog world and basically crushed it. Kind of like a post-modern Boll Weevil. Newspapers dead and dying, music magazines closing left and right and/or shrinking and "Re-Positioning themselves with the marketplace." A&R types running scared shitless any which way they can trying to figure a doable fiscal model for the 21st century music "industry."

That's at least a start. I want to riff with Simon on Jameson re: time and place. But like many a long jam I've gotten to the bridge on Part 1. Part 2 on the flipside.

I'm just a singer (in a rock and roll band).

An old grad school friend recently did the 25 Things meme:

ok, 25 random things about me
Sunday, February 1, 2009 at 7:10pm

1. I live for spectator sports.
2. My true calling is to be a singer in a rock-n-roll band. . . .

It's funny but I remember her expressing the same John Lodge fantasy 22 years ago in the back garden at either Rigg's or Lucio's house or most likely in front of the Humanities Center nee English annex out on Campus Drive by Chi Theta Chi. So to aid and abet this project, I of course made a mix.



THE MJC Rawk Experience

Lucille Boggan, "Coffee Grindin' Woman"
The Avengers, "The Amerikan in Me"
The Avengers, "White Nigger"
Penelope Houston, "Bed of Lies"
Barbara Manning, "Every Pretty Girl"
Two Nice Girls, "Spent My Last 10 dollars On Birth Control and Beer"
Bedlam Rovers, "Big Drill"
Bedlam Rovers, "Star of the County Down"
Siouxsie & The Banshees, "Spellbound"
X-Ray Spex, "Oh Bondage Up Yours!"
X-Ray Spex, "Germfree Adolescents"
The Slits. "Typical Girls"
Pylon, "Cool"
Young Marble Giants, Searching For Mr Right
Kate Bush, "Hounds of Love"
Blake Babies, "Rain" (Demo)
L7, "Pretend We're Dead"
Bikini Kill, "White Boy"
Bikini Kill, "This is Not a Test"
Hole, "Rock Star"
Garrison Starr, "Superhero"
Sleater-Kinney, "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"
Sleater-Kinney, "Light Rail Coyote"

Liners
Lucille Boggan AKA Bessie Jackson—This is one of her more air-friendly offerings as it's merely suggestive rather than crudely explicit. Another song starts "My Nipples are Hard as Diamonds" and goes downhill from there, and you do have to wonder who paid to record that in the 1920s, but she is a Diva.

The Avengers were from SF and fronted by a teen-aged Penelope Houston sporting a blond crew cut she grows up and out and the more zaftig Penelope becomes a neo-folkie star in Germany! And at the Freight & Salvage on the Berkeley/Oakland line.

Barbara Manning another Bay Area fave solo or with her band the SF Seals. Yep, there's a big baseball thing going on here.

Two nice girls is three lesbians from Austin, TX; they also specialize in acoustic mix-ups like "Sweet Jane with Affection" (Lou Reed meet Joan Armatrading) or "I Feel (Like Makin') Love" (Donna Summer this is Bad Company).

Bedlam Rovers yet again criminally overlooked Bay area band, which on one track explores their Celtic roots. I mean c'mon the best band history I could find was in Italian, so now I'm gonna translate it for the poor guy.

X-Ray Spex's Poly Styrene and friends made a day glo punk classic one of the greatest debut albums ever

Ari Up, Palmolive, Viv Albertine, and later Budgie (who also drummed for Siouxie's Banshees) made uncompromising punk rock. They also made a joyously reggae-inflected cover of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine"!

Pylon was the greatest band to come out of Athens, GA and everyone from Michael Stipe to Kate Pierson will tell you so. Alas lead guitarist Randall Bewley died from a heart attack at 53 a few months ago.

Young Marble Giants out of Cardiff-area Wales made 1 2/3 full length records and were always sui generis. Colossal Youth was hands down the best disc of 1983. One of the greatest album covers ever, esp. in the Black & white Division. They're so cool they don't need quotation marks for their song title above.

Couldn't find my 7" copy of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" to burn to MP3, so went with the title track from her best album.

Blake Babies were Julianna Hatfield before she became overexposed. Evan Dando was in this band for about three months and plays bass on this demo; another Beantown-area favorite mid-1980s. The other emergent songwriter was John Strohm, now surely the coolest lawyer working in Birmingham, AL!

[Correction 5/20/2009. Dando played on "Lament" Andy Mayer bass here on this Strohm-penned number from the first demo. My physical copy of Innocence And Experience just returned home complete with useful CD booklet after a long time away. Sorry for the confusion.]

And now for the big RRRRIOTTTTT GRRRRRLLL Conclusion . . .

L7 early radio-friendly version of the movement. "Good" (?) Presbyterian that I am, I'm all for somebody bustin' on Falwell, Reed, and their hypocritical ilk. Neither moral nor in the majority!

Bikini Kill: I know I know this is turning into a Julia Styles mopey, misunderstood–teenpic. Still those early records take few prisoners. Look elsewhere for their ratting out Sonic Youth on "Thurston Hearts a Who."

Hole never really got their due because of Courtney's various antics and the whole tidal onslaught that was associated with Nirvana. This record is bitchy but also a pretty "true" accounting of what was happening at Evergreen State College in Olympia, launching pad of so many riot girl rockers like as with the final band

Garrison Starr signed the biggest individual contract ever by an artist coming out of Mississippi, but Geffen was never able to launch her nationally; she's returned from LA and settled into pop country crossover land near Nashville. I've seen her play venues ranging from a back porch at an impromptu house party to a 10,000 seat outdoor amphitheater. Her best gig ever was opening for Cracker in Starkville at Rick's in 1998. She blew them off the stage; of course, it didn’t hurt that her backing band was essentially Wilco less Jeff Tweedy–through the John Stirratt/Jay Bennett Oxford, MS connection. They did the absolute best version of "The Chain" I've ever heard, including Fleetwood Mac live.

Sleater-Kinney: I could listen to Janet Weiss drum (see also Quasi, Heavens to Betsy, & Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks) or Carrie Brownstein play guitar all day long. A sociolinguist by training, Brownstein's NPR media blog Monitor Mix is worth a looksie.

I avoided more obvious choices like Pat Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield" or Liz Phair's "Supernova" as well as more well-known female artists like Joan Jett, The Go-Gos, The Bangles, and The Pretenders

Inside out/outside in; or, hold on i'm comin'.

So I got the following CFP on Wed, 6 May 2009 14:25:54 -0400:

Dear Colleagues,

The American Shakespeare Center, in partnership with Shakespeare's Globe in London, will host its fifth Blackfriars Conference, "Inside Out/Outside In," in honor of Andy Gurr in Staunton, Virginia, from 20-25 October 2009. Registration fee includes tickets to the ASC productions of 1 Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Titus Andronicus, Much Ado about Nothing, and The Rehearsal by George Villiers (et al); opening and closing banquets; a special presentation by the ASC actors honoring the work of Andy Gurr; and Paul Menzer's Shakespeare on Ice, a play and cocktail party.

We are inviting proposals for papers on topics to do with early modern drama in performance, including but not restricted to the staging, texts, design, repertory, personnel, and the business of plays in early modern England. Paper presentations are limited to 10 minutes (presentation without actors) and to 13 minutes (presentations with ASC actors). Presenters should be aware that they will hear the sound of a thundersheet when two minutes remain and will exit pursed by a bear when time is out.

Submit a 300 word abstract and a short bio to Sarah Enloe, Director of Education, by May 30, 2009. Please include a brief statement saying whether or not you would be interested in having your work in a volume of Blackfriars Conference essays.

Now Andrew Gurr is one of my absolute cultural heroes, even if all he had EVER done was write this. But THEN he also wrote this and helped uncover this for good matter plus a lot else to boot. Quite a career indeed!

It just so happens I had a handy piece about staging one version of The Merry Wives of Windsor! So I sent in the following:


Falstaff at the Garter:
The 1602 Merry Wives of Windsor Quarto as City Comedy

The Merry Wives of Windsor exists in two distinct versions: its first Quarto (1602) and the First Folio (1623). Specifically, the Quarto takes place either in London or an unnamed provincial town, while the Folio version is resolutely located in the royal village of Windsor, hard by the castle. Ironically, the later Folio version might represent the original version of the play as written for the Feast of the Garter in 1597. Sometime later perhaps, Shakespeare might have reworked the play for the commercial stage, hoping to capitalize on the rage for city comedy, which had been developing since the late 1590s. I focus on the Quarto version of the play, which highlights the connections to city comedy, and which I take to be closer to the version performed on the London stage.

Throughout the play Falstaff operates as a prototypical gallant: he wears peculiar dress, makes passionate love to assorted women, is a notorious gamester, and resides at the Garter. But Shakespeare inverts the typical gallant situation by having Falstaff, his urban gallant, gulled by the commercial classes of the town. I also connect Falstaff's character to gender considerations. From such gender considerations, we see the underlying metadramatic concerns of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play very much concerned with contemporary London theatrical practices whatever town it supposedly occurs in. The Quarto's "location" allows Shakespeare to comment upon the class tensions at once central to theatrical alehouses as illustrated by the pairs Sly and the Lord and Hal and Francis and important to the burgeoning contemporary city comedy, a genre which directly links the alehouse scenes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the coffeehouse scenes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Short Bio

G.E. Light received his PhD from Stanford in 1994. He was Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University from 1996-2003. His publications include "Beer and The Bard" (1996), "All Hopped Up: Beer, Cultivated National Identity, and Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1525–1624” (1998), "Falstaff’s Cups of Sack: New Readings of Henry V II.iii.25" (2002), reviews in Albion, Renaissance Quarterly, and Text, and a "virtual" dialogue with Bryan Reynolds on "the naming-function" in chapter one of Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009), published today! Currently he blogs The Nevermind Aesthetic and is a freelance journalist focusing primarily on music and publishing in a variety of venues including Dusted Magazine, Stylus Magazine, and Perfect Sound Forever, and a DJ at WMSV. He produces record reviews, was a columnist writing about "Seconds-Perfect Moments in Pop", has done artist interviews with Marshall Grant, Kevin Shields, Plastic People of the Universe, Robert Ellis Orrall, and written some longer think pieces about such topics as the hidden history of Southern urban blues and 90s Noise Rock.

The one i love.

This is the opening gambit to a found object novel, Love Letters, I'll probably never complete. Still the opening was pretty fun to create and might mean something to folks who spent part of the 80s or 90s in the Bay Area.


Call me Ishie. Ishie of Dorkmandy. I used to be sorta like the King himself, Tommy. No not that deaf, dumb and blind kid, the MTX one, Tom H., Chi-Mo, Sheepie— that one. But then I grew up and left the whole rock star dream steadfastly in the rearview. Of course, Ishie's not my real name. But then Moby's not the real name of that short bald guy who made millions with Alan Lomax's or was it Harry Smith's [ed. Alan Lomax, Sounds of the South box set] musical offal. As Stubbsie said, or was it Simon? [ ed. Paul Morley, actually, in Words and Music: a history of pop in the shape of a city (2003), p. 199] an "example of corporately sponsored, fake-ethnic, ambient business blues." Melville that, Holmes!

It all began when I bought the aging Victorian on Portrero Hill 2 blocks north of Fritz Maytag's Anchor Steam Brewery. You see I was a young buck at Pillsbury Madison & Sutro or at least a new legal librarian with a freshly minted MIS degree from Florida State. Ironically I'm something of a Luddite or at least a retro fetishist.[1] Thus I use the old proper name for the SF half of the new über-global firm Pillsbury Winthrop LLP. Well … we can still see who was the Senior Partner! Take that you Pompous, Stuffy Manhattanites . . . Of course, coming from someone in PMS' employee that's the proverbial kettle calling the pot black. Ha, "PMS' employee" describing a guy, that's a good one [ed. Puhleeze!] Can you say "White shoe firm"? Good, I knew you could.

O.K. O.K. Back to the story at hand. So I had found this neat, nearly affordable three story house (think Michael Keaton in Pacific Heights, which by the way was shot on Portrero, O.J.'s original 'hood). With my new PMS salary (sorry can't help myself) [ed. "Apparently not!" said archly] and a small familial bequest I could just swing the down payment and make the monthly mortgage, assuming I went on a 5-day-a-week Top Ramen diet for at least 2 years and ate out only once every three months, but not at Chez Panisse, Ernie's, The French Laundry, The Lark Creek Inn, Geordy's, Boulevard, Alain Rondelli, Fleur de Lys, Woodward's Gardens, Restaurant Gary Danko, Masa's or any place of that ilk.[2] Instead I feasted on Rillette du Périgord—$5 at Café Claude—or an 8-oz cheeseburger topped with avocado—$5.50 from Slider's Diner—or the best yet: a Super Burrito—$3.50 at El Farolito in the Mission.

To begin again it all began after a late night walk/stumble home from the Bottom of The Hill in late January 2008. The Angry Samoans, I think? Or no? maybe it was The Mr. T Experience? Or perhaps even more obscure old school like a Samiam show? Don't really remember, do I? You get the picture though. Loud three chord punk rock with witty lyrics and the occasional sweet harmony. A Bay Area staple since B4 Penelope Houston & The Avengers hit the Mabuhay Gardens in '78 with a proof sheet from J. Neo (Marvin). Kinda reminds one of Darby & The Great Society, better yet The Mojo Men, "She's My Baby". Or some other Lenny Kaye approved Nugget™. Anyway, well Nevermind, that doesn’t really matter, does it? So let's continue shall we. [locks fingers pauses, and takes a deep OHM-like breath to clear the chi while searching for the lost chord] I'd been moving in slowly over a long weekend. The former owner had mysteriously left town in a hurry (rumor had it there was at least one woman involved)—some said an unwanted pregnancy, others hinted at something even more sinister no doubt inspired by Mr. Keaton's cinematic exemplar (I still shudder at the cockroaches)— there was kinky talk of non-baseball triple plays and swinging—just not for the fences, but the lone romantic on this sunny hillside—a sixty-something little old lady from Pasadena and solitary shut-in—assured me over tepid Paul Masson California "sherry" and brie slices on Carrs® Sesame Table Water® crackers that it was all (more or less) on the "up and up", while claiming convincingly or least with a kind of confident authority one never knows whether or not to trust, that "the 'couple' had 'eloped' [elaborate scare quotes made with both hands] to her hometown of Chicago and the quaint Andersonville neighborhood." She added conspiratorially, "She really didn't look Swedish you know? Beautiful yes, I mean truly drop dead gorgeous, curves where they should be—none of that modern model stick thin garbage but like a real women should. You know the type Lollobridgida, Mansfield, Ekberg, Monroe, Loren, Anouk Aimée the REAL beauties—and her with a mega-watt smile to boot, But Swedish never, too dark, too Latin." Whatever. What do I know about the intricacies/ethnicities of Chicago neighborhoods I've never heard of before?[3] So they ran away together, so what? Sounds like much ado about a henpecked you all intellectual to quote George Gordon [ed. Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I Stanza XXII "But – Oh! Ye lords of ladies intellectual,/Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?"]. Anyway to recommence, the house was in pretty good condition except for one room way in the back on the third floor; it seemed to have served as some kind of office cum library cum random storage space. It had taken me the better part of two half days to clear out the detritus that still remained in this "office". One sole cardboard liquor box of stuff remained to be culled through for any "treasures".

That's when I found the notebooks—Mead Composition 100 sheets wide ruled, the kind with the faux marbled black and white cardboard cover stock. 3 of them. Preternaturally genetically curious and with over 10 years training as an archival researcher …. Oh yes, I forgot to introduce myself, didn't I? So very sorry about that! That's Dr. Geoffrey Quillerman Beinstock IV to you; GQ to my oldest friends from down south except for the really witty ones who just yelled my surname "Beinstock!" like they were Joan Shawlee's Sweet Sue in Some Like It Hot. Then there was that eating club asshole in Cottage on Prospect who just wiggled four fingers palm backwards and did the head nod thing when he wanted to take my attention away from the traditional beans and franks at lunch. But then he was Wellington Dumont Percivall the Fifth and you know how bad "the Fifth's" can be, don't you? Did I mention I'm really into movies of all ilks? Merde, even some nouvelle vague French ones. Back in the mid '80s I did a MTL PhD at Stanford; Dissertation Title—My Brother Fought In Nicaragua and all I got was this lousy t-shirt: Life As A Faux Contra in Berkeley. Committee: Regenia Gagnier, Chair, Russell Berman, Marxist Interventionist and close reader extraordinaire, and Hans Üllrich Gümbrecht, "token" European theory type (get your umlauts here 2 for the price of 1). Not only did I win The Little Shop of Horrors (aka Roger Corman) Memorial Dissertation Fellowship, but I also actually won a tenure track job at a big Cow College near home, kinda like the one in Moo except way more fetid ("It's not the heat, it's the humidity"), But as you might imagine, it REALLY REALLY wasn't a very good fit at all.

My personal mid-life crisis entailed going back to school. Because library jobs were plentiful, my training and temperament suited the profession, and I'd been interested in the law ever since I saw Inherit The Wind as a 10 year old, rapidly devouring Irving Stone's Clarence Darrow for the Defense the next week, I decided to pursue an Information Systems degree and sell myself to the biggest/richest law firm I could find in a city I could stand to live in for at least five years. Like Mr B, I guess I too left something in the Bay Area [ed. We can only assume it wasn't a heart]. Thus I managed to crib the holy grail of Legal Librarian jobs, a junior position at Pillsbury Winthrop nee Madison & Sutro [ed. probably an Ivy league summa pedigree, Cambridge "starred" first at Milton, Darwin and Schama's Christ's on a Marshall Scholarship then followed by the Stanford PhD had a little something to do with "earning" this coveted position]. So where was I? [consults his handwritten ms] Oh yes, ahem "Curious and with over 10 years training as an archivist (yes much better more succinct, direct, and to the point), I dove into the last cardboard box. A bunch of legal documents, some bank records and then the mother lode. Those 3 inconspicuous black composition books entitled, in handwritten black ink, probably from a Sharpie®, LoveLetters. There was an Act I, an Act II, and an Act III. What follows is my recreated case study of In Re: HFM vs. Jane Does 1–3. Without further let or hindrance [ed. We told him to cut the legal mumbo jumbo . . .sigh], we begin . . .

[1] Luddite a term from 19th century English history referring to anti-industrialists who destroyed looms as well as wool and cotton mills in the Midlands first (Nottinghamshire), but then primarily in Northern England (the west Riding of Yorkshire and Lancashire); one of their primary defenders was Beinstock's culture hero Lord Byron. More recently in his epochal The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson has forwarded the thesis that Luddites were not anti-technology but rather were worried about the abolition of set prices and the introduction of the free market.
[2] This is a rather curious list for 2008 as Ernie's, Geordy's, and Alain Rondelli had long been closed, but then we assume Beinstock dined there during his halcyon graduate school days. Elsewhere he has written rhapsodically about an earlier memorable meal at Chez Panisse (2nd seating) with his Princeton college roommate Chauncey Frobisher whose Lazard Frères expense account covered the bill.
[3] More than most people! A trait at once infuriating, charming and somewhat unique. Beinstock defines knowledge and the art of knowing a bit about some topic differently than the average person; when he says he doesn't know about something be very wary because chances are he knows a lot more about it than you do. He just defines "knowing" something as being considered close to a last word expert on the topic: "anything less is NOT KNOWLEDGE" he once (in)famously exclaimed to a student who was complaining about the difficulty of his final exam for a split-level junior, senior, and master's candidate class on the 17th century.

Laissez les bon temps roulez.

More or less instant reactions to the college football season just ended.

A fitting end to the craziest football season I've seen in my 43 years. Don't buy the hype about how this is the new paradigm; this year was exceptional in the purest sense of that word (not great necessarily, but merely very different from the norm), an outlier, unreal, even insane at times if a season can be to said to have something akin to consciousness.

Yes, I know that the game has changed (longer kickoffs, no tearaway jerseys blah blah blah), and scholarship reductions are bringing about some semblance of parity. But c'mon a D I-AA (excusez moi NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision and doesn't THAT phrase just mellifluously roll of the tongue) team goes to the Big House and lays smack down in a pre-conference=schedule "fluff" game; o.k., Appalachian State WERE 2-time defending national champions at their level and, after a mid-season blip, became thrice national football championship subdivision champs.

Speaking of famous I-AA defeats of their higher brethren in football (Maine over Mississippi State par example), I do remember the FAMU Rattlers knocking off the Miami Hurricanes the year they won the inaugural Division I-AA championship behind the brilliant Tallahassee Godby High Product, Albert Chester, Sr, winning the first football national championship for the state. Yes folks the 1970s were something of a football wasteland in the Sunshine State. It's really Miami's first win in 1983 that sets the table for the ersthwile big three: UF, FSU, Miami to dominate until at least the 2000 Sugar Bowl and BCS Championship for FSU. But in 1978 Miami was mediocre at best, although their 6-5 record was only their second winning record in over a decade. You get the picture: Definitely Not the Cane's of 4 national titles in a legendary nine-year-run (1983-1991).

So back to this peculiar college football season, where #1 teams seemed to lose weekly. A historical season and one like no other. If I was picking on merit at the end of the season, National Champion: LSU! The weirdness of this season surely deserves a legitimate 2-loss National Champion. 2nd best team: UGA Bulldogs—putting an exclamation point on the year that the SEC had. Sorry USC: you lost at home in the L.A. Coliseum to a frankly terrible Stanford Cardinal (my graduate alma mater my prerogative to call 'em out), and your schedule was generally weak. For an alpha and omega thing: how about my MSU Bulldogs winning 8 games including the Liberty Bowl after beginning the season with a crushing 45-0 home loss to those same LSU Tigers. Maybe it wasn't such a crazy year after all . . . Will you Big 10 apologists please just shut up!

P.S. My undergrad alma mater ultimately had a fine year too, says the proud 1982 inductee of the Harvard Varsity Club! Undefeated in the Ivy League, champs with a crushing and somewhat unexpected 37-6 away victory over the hated Eli—"Yale: They make locks, don't they?"

Come join the band!

Besides needing scholarship money, why would you ever join a military style marching band? Especialy when you could be a rock star instead like this



and this



All Right Now! JumP JumP JumP!

Rammer Jammer that!



Long live the scatter band tradition.

10,000 men of harvard.

2 for 2 on alma mater games in this craziest of college football seasons!

The Game

Harvard 37 Yale Lock Company 6

Illegitimum non carborundum;
Domine salvum fac.
Illegitimum non Carborundum;
Domine salvum fac.
Gaudeamus igitur!
Veritas non sequitur?
Illegitimum non carborundum -- ipso facto!
Ten thousand men of Harvard want vict'ry today,
For they know that o'er old Eli
Fair Harvard holds sway.
So then we'll conquer old Eli's men,
And when the game ends, we'll sing again:
Ten thousand men of Harvard gained vict'ry today!

The Big Game

Stanford 20 Bezerkeley Zoo 13

The dirty golden bear
is losing all his hair
his teeth are out, he's got the gout
he knows not what it's all about
his eyes are made of glass
he's losing all his class
so TAKE the dirty golden bear and shove him up your ***!

Sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band.

It was twenty years ago today,
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They've been going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile
So may I introduce to you
The act you've known for all these years . . .

Hüsker Dü! Got ya.

If my punk rock essay was my last piece of musical juvenalia, then the following record review, which I wrote for fun and with no sense of ever publishing it, was my first full blown adult effort during my first year of graduate school at Stanford. I'll print it as I wrote it then during the summer of 1987 and in an addendum make some comments and criticisms of the effort, which I'm still pretty proud of 21 years later, except for "THAT intro."



Hüsker Dü
Warehouse Songs and Stories
Warner Bros.

This week brings two double helpings from Minneapolis. I really don't want to waste time with an album whose song titles use sickeningly cute words like "☮" and "U". Besides do we really need four more sides of flatulent outbursts from the littlest big ego in rock? So let us hie to fresh woods, for there's a new day rising.

A friend of mine at Harvard once enthusiastically exclaimed that Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade was "the White Album of the American hardcore movement." I figured it wasn't worth it to point out that this seemed, at best, a questionable tribute to Minnesota's sonic boom trio. But that's another story. A scant three years have passed, and Hüsker Dü present us with yet another double album, Warehouse: Songs and Stories. Noting the pitfalls of comparison, I nevertheless will fearlessly proclaim that this album is the Exile on Main Street of the American post-punk movement. It's that raw, that powerful, and that good.

In a world of declarative statements (Just Say No!, Fight for your Right to Party!), Warehouse refreshingly resorts to pointed and often poignant questions: "Is it pathetic to be sympathetic?", "Is love another way to count the things you haven't got?", "Does wanting a feeling matter any more?". Clearly this is not light-hearted frivolity. The tone of the album is set in the song, "Charity, Chastity, Prudence and Hope" where this quartet tragically enlarged from the classical triumvirate has no place now for Faith merely the possibility of "Hope". And it all needs to be deeply thought about using the classical skill of Prudentia or the sagacity to distinguish between corageous and merely reckless acts.

In the past, I've tended to favor the Dü songs written by the band's manic drummer, Grant Hart, for their comic sensibilities. On their major-label debut, Candy Apple Gray, Hart seemed to become almost as serious as fellow songwriter Bob Mould. Witness "Sorry Somehow," which along with Cameo's "Word Up!" was certainly the best single of 1985. On Warehouse Hart and Mould, lead guitarist-cum-real life fleshy Minneapolis Poppin' Fresh, alternate songs in a cycle of despair, denial, and separation, all driven along by Greg Norton, owner of the best moustache in popular culture since Salvador Dalí, and his bass. The thrash boys have grown up and faced the cruel realities of America.

The first and last songs of the album signify this new awareness, as Mould told Joan Rivers on Carson, "as you get older, your emotional spectrum becomes a little more involved, a little wider . . . . It's not just screaming about how messed up the government is and about how much you hate your parents anymore." Mould's "These Important Years" is a paean to a somehow unsatisfying carpe diem existence: "If you don't stop to smell the roses now / They might end up on you." By album's end we've bee presented with myriad failed and failing relationship, and, while Hart's final "You Can Live at Home" seems to promise something positive in the very power of its titular assertion, the chorus, "walk, walk away, keep on walking away," stresses the impossibility of true romance. The final coda of guitar fadeouts provides the only real sense of escape.

This new found contemplative maturity evokes itself in the very music. No longer are Hüsker Dü merely a hardcore band; they now feel self-confident enough to quote and borrow from their formative American rock influences. New sounds abound on Warehouse. The mocking cuckoo at the end of "Tell You Why Tomorrow" and the bells in the folksy "She Floated Away" smack of the unusual and early Velvet Underground; some Chuck Berry guitar riffs invade the intro to "Too Much Spice." The strange shift to half-time at the end of "Back From Somewhere" reminds me of The New York Dolls' "Personality Crisis." In now way, however, is Hüsker Dü derivative, for they retain their unique sense of urgent, post-punk metallurgy.

Sure The Joshua Tree will sell zillions, all the major media rags will anoint U2 this year's artists of the eighties, and your poseur friends will claim they saw the October tour back in '82, but you have an opportunity to flip your wig and join the real rock revolution. While Dublin's favorite sons garner all the recognition, Warehouse remains the only serious candidate to date for album of the year honors. Just remember that the best things from Minnesota no longer come plastered in paisley.


Addendum
I can't believe I was so wrong on first hearing Prince's Sign '☮' The Times: mea maxima culpa. I needed to come at the album from my love of 1970s era funk and soul, especially the trio of stone cold political classics—There's A Riot Goin' On, What's Going On, and One Nation Under a Groove, which I did in 1988. So eventually I got it. Apologies especially to Mr. Matos! At least I got Prince from his debut through Purple Rain as the final line of the piece implies (i.e. The best things out of Minneapolis used to emerge from Paisley Park and Prince). As to the lame "flip you wig" reference as pun, I just couldn't help myself then or even 18 years later!

With respect to the piece itself, I'm not sure why I used the weak helping verb "to seem" so much? Some kind of verbal tic I guess. Also if the piece seems to (hahaha) rely too much on lyrical analysis, remember I was fresh off a year doing a MA in English Romanticism at York and beginning a PhD in English at Stanford. In the year of Culture, Two Sevens Clash and New Order, Substance to mention but two real contenders, the claim about Warehouse's status as the sole album of the year candidate looks more than naive in retrospect.

Still and all and despite these criticisms, I think this was a pretty good first crack at writing a "grown up"/post-collegiate-hothouse album review. I especially enjoyed the various pop culture references from Minneapolis' own industrial giant (General Mills) through the Dadesque Spanish icon to Reagan-era abstinence programs. Feel free to comment on how wrong I am now or was then.

For you.

Princess cards she sends me with her regards
Barroom eyes shine vacancy, to see her you gotta look hard
Wounded deep in battle, I stand stuffed like some soldier undaunted
To her Cheshire smile, I'll stand on file, she's all I ever wanted
But you let your blue walls get in the way of these facts
Honey, get your carpetbaggers off my back
You wouldn't even give me time to cover my tracks
You said, "Here's your mirror and your ball and jacks"
But they're not what I came for, and I'm sure you see that too
--Bruce Springsteen, "For You," Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ (1973)

To conclude: 5 very special mix tapes I didn't make



The Romantic Shakespeare Tapes compiled by Jeff Erickson

Jeffrey Paul Erickson was my cohortmate and best friend and procurer of two of "my favorite things"—an official Warner Bros. Marvin Martian "tea" mug and an inflatable Munch's The Scream figurine doll— during 10 glorious years in the Bay Area. We made it through grad school, travelled far and wide together from Santa Cruz through Sutter Creek to Volcano stopping at many highbrow joints along the way like Ken's Wagon Wheel in Mountain View, the late Alain Rondelli in the Inner Richmond, Boulevard under the shadow of the Bay Bridge, and Perko's Koffe Kup just outside Stockton on California 88 just off US 99 and south of Lodi for all the CCR fans out there—Jeff never met a breakfast he couldn't eat "Night and Day"!— and from the side of Mt. Shasta through the Rogue River Gulch past Crater Lake by Ashland and on to Eugene returning via Mendocino, and Boonville and so forth, were joint founding members of the Guttersnipes bowling team, saw Solti conduct the Cleveland Orchestra at Davies Symphony Hall, and shared a profound love for the Oakland Athletics (my "other" American League team not currently World Champions: PSYCHE! You can take the Boy outta Boston, but you can't take Boston et cetera). We've been out of touch too long.



Romantic Shakespeare I: Overtures/Incidental Music 10/5/89

Side A
Berlioz:
King Lear Overture
Sir Colin Davis
London Symphony
********************
Tchaikovsky:
Romeo and Juliet
Riccardo Muti
Philadelphia Orch.
********************
Tchaikovsky:
Hamlet Overture
Geoffrey Simon
London Symphony

Side B
Mendelssohn:
A Midsummer Night's
Dream:
Overture; Scherzo
Intermezzo; Nocturne
Finale
James Levine
Chicago Symphony
*******************
Dvorak:
Othello Overture
Vernon Handley
Ulster Orchestra



Romantic Shakespeare II: ROMEO AND JULIET symphony/ballet

Side A
Berlioz, Romeo et Juliette:
Introduction
Romeo alone/the Ball
Departure
Love Scene
Queen Mab Scherzo

Riccardo Muti
Phildelpphia Orchestra

Side B
Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet:
I.ii Dance of the Knights'Mercurtio
Balcony Scene
II.iii Tybalt & Mercutio
Mercutio Dies
Death of Tybalt

III.i. Introduction
Morning Serenade
Juliet's Funeral
Death of Juliet

Lorin Maazel
Cleveland Orchestra



the tape of GEL compiled by Joey Pensak

Side A
idaho-a sound awake
sparklehorse-pig
kelly wingate-awake (demo)

[Joey was the drummer for Starkville's sole slowcore band Kelly Wingate, as it's a rare demo we won't make a snide comment about compiling yourself]

red house painters-shock me/sundays and holidays
belle + sebastian-expectations
those bastard souls-dirty looks
jeff buckley-so real
galaxie 500-forth of july

[double bonus points to Joey a late 90s era pupil for discovering my college classmates' band!]

natalie merchant-special oddity
red house painters-three legged cat

Side B
bjork-army of me/hyperballad
lisa germano-victoria's secret
hooverphonic-battersea
massive attack-teardrop
jsbx-bellbottoms
gbv-a salty salute

[Long Live Rockathon!]

tortoise-glass museum
morphine-the night

[I once stood in a queue outside the Great American Music Hall for a benefit performance of A Live Supreme by a host of Bay Area saxophone giants right next to Dana Colley; he was a pleasant fellow]

moby-porcelain





selected $WINGIN' UTTER$ compiler: Dane Johnson

Side A
from The streets of SF
Teenage Genoice
Storybook Disease
tied down, spit on
catatstrophe
MR BELIEVER
no place in the run
No Eager Men
JUST LIKE THEM
Soldier Boy
LAST CHANCE
All Laced Up
Expletive deleted
* + * + * + * + * +

Bonus Tracks

Side B
from A juvenile product of the working class
Windspitting Punk
no time to play
Nowhere Fast
KEEP RUNNING
Sustain
One in All
Sign it Away
Almost Brave
Londo Drunk
The Black Pint
Bigot's Barrel
a stop to go
The Next in Line
time tells time
* + * + * + * + * +

Bonus Tracks



Bulb's Light bulb on the water Zipede Doo Dah/The Glowbugs Uncle remos mix tape compilers: The Redondo children (Chris and Rachel) with production assistance from Donna J. Lee

Donna was a former student of mine who became a close friend after graduation. Following a lifelong interest in working with children—she partially paid for law school by working at the campus day care center—she spent one summer babysitting some kids. They wanted to make a "mix tape" for me; now of course they probably have virtual iTunes playlists. Still, The children are our future. This is by far the shortest mix tape discussed, but in many ways it is the truest to the ethos of cassette culture—totally homemade and completely unexpected, arriving out of the blue in the mail. It's also one of the few cassette letters I have ever received and certainly the nicest.

Side A
Intro-"Hello G.E. I've got an idea let's do 'Lightbulb on the water'"
The Glowbugs (aka Rachel and Chris)-Lightbulb on the water

[track sung Karaoke-style to the tune "Candle on the Water" from Pete's Dragon]

The Glowbugs-Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Song of the South

[1947 Academy Award for Best Original Song]

Chopsticks on synthesizer interlude
Personal message and farewell

Side B
30:00 (of tape hum, buzz, and assorted other "white noises")

[A precocious homage to John Cage]

Here endeth the "Nine Lessons and Carols" on the Art of the Mix/Cassette Culture!

San francisco nights/everywhere that I'm not.

Some KZSU-era mix tapes





The Best of Wednesday Night Live compiled by Ben D. and Steve V.

Side A
X-Tal-Encore 10/25/89
The Donner Party-Sickness 2/15/89
Harm Farm Ed's Bait Shop 11/15/89
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282-Motor Flarry II 4/28/90
Tragic Mulatto-My Name is Not O;Neill 11/29/89
Barbara Manning-On On and One 4/26/89 [My 25th birthday!]
The Movie Stars-The Greek Song 4/2/90
Jerry Shelfer-I Can Honly Tonk 5/31/89
The Chuck Prophet Band-Killing the Blues 1/31/90

Side B
M1-Alternative-Juliet 3/1/89
Thadeus-Man in Motion 2/25/90
Primus-Too Many Puppies 5/3/89
Dot 3-99 Monkeys 10/14/88
Psychefunkapus-Image 5/15/89
Fungo Mungo-Les Hommes 2/7/90

S.F. Seen

Side A
Translator-Everywhere That I'm Not
-No Time Like Now
Flipper-Life
Avengers-Corpus Christi
Penelope Houston-Living Dolls
X-Tal-Amateur Alchemist/Ragamuffin Girl/Your Fragile Mind
Harm Farm-Jersey Devil
Snapdragons-Greeneyed girl

Side B
The (ex-)Catheads-Waterfall
The Movie Stars-Another Romance
Ophelias=Leah Hirsig
Primus-John The Fisherman
Psychefunkapus-17 & Up
Green Day-16/Going to Pasalacqua
SamiAm-Too Msany Buttons
The Mr. T Experience-Supersonic/At Gilman Street
A Subtle Plague-Twist
Frightwig-AMA '89
Tragic Mulatto-Debbie

Blue & Black 3/23/90

Blue Side
Frank Sinatra-One For My Baby (and One More For The Road)
The Pogues & The Dubliners-The Irish Rover
The Doors-Whiskey Bar
The Smiths-These Things Take Time
Neil Young-Barstool Blues
Jefferson Airplane-White Rabbit
Kate Bush-The Hounds of Love
The Style Council w/Tracey Thorn-The Paris Match
Sinead O'Connor-Nothing Compares 2 U
Billy Bragg-Levi Stubbs' Tears
Aaron Neville-Tell It Like It Is
Albert Collins-When A Guitar Plays The Blues
The Clash Revolution Rock (incomplete)

Black Side
The Rolling Stones-Sway
Johnny Cash-The Man in Black
The Pogues-And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda
Penelop Houston-Bed of Lies
Sinead O'Connor-Black Boys On Mopeds
Elvis Costello-Shipbuilding

[Yeah I know I shoulda gone with the Robert Wyatt cover, so sue me!]

Jesus and Mary Chain-Nine Million Rainy Days
Joy Division-New Dawn Fades
New Order-Elegia
The Cure-Love Song
David Bowie-Panic In Detroit

38A Quake! 11/3/89

Side A only
Dusty Springfield & The Pet Shop Boys-What Have I Done to Deserve This
Violet Femmes-Blister in the Sun
The B-52s-Love Shack
Haircut One Hundred-Love Plus One
General Public-Never you Done That
Winston Groovy-Please Don't Make Me Cry
Fine Young Cannibals-Come Home Johnny
Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell-Ain't No Mountain High Enough
Daed or Alive-Come Home with Me Baby
Modern English-I Melt With You
The Ramones-I Wanna Be Sedated
The J. Geils Band- (Ain't Nothing But A) House Party

Dance Party 6/17/89

B Side only
Men Without Hats-Safety Dance
Cetu Javu-Situations
Depeche Mode-Everything Counts
The B-52s-Legal Tender
Time Zone w/Afrika Bambaattaa-World Destruction
Tone Loc-Wild Thing
Cameo-Word Up!
Fine Young Cannibals-She Drives Me Crazy
New Order-Round & Round
X-Los Angeles
The Sex Pistols-God Save the Queen

Rock Mix/Jazz Mix circa 1987

Side A
The Romantics-What I Like ABout You
The Skids-Into The Valley
The Lyres-Help You Ann
Fuzzbox ep-XXsexx
That Petrol Emotion-Tightlipped
APB-Shoot You Down
The Cult-She Sells Sanctuary
The Cure-The Love Cats
Hüsker Dü-Don't Wnat to Know if You Are Lonely
The Smiths-Bigmouth Strikes Again
Martin Stephenson & The Daintees-Coleen
The Waterboys-The Whole of the Moon
The Velvet Underground-I Can't Stand It
R.E.M.-Ages of You

Side B
The Lester Bowie Brass Fantasy-I Only Have Eyes for You
Charlie Parker-Embraceable You
Stanley Turrentine & the 3 Sounds-Blue Riff
Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five-West End Blues
Cab Calloway-Jumpin' Jive
Duke Ellington-Take The 'A' Train
Miles Davis-So What
Thelonious Monk-Straight, No Chaser
Ben Webster-Autumn Leaves

The English 189A Tapes Creating a Popular Culture: 3 Historical Case Studies 9/11/90
The 3 Historical Case Studies were The English Revolution, The Industrial Revolution in England And the US, and The Rise of Youth Culture after WWII. Basing my course on one John Brewer taught at Harvard, I not only had a huge reader covering everything from Jello Biafra's run for mayor of San Francisco to Mario Savio's FSM Greek Theater speech to Dwight McDonald's famous New Yorker profile of Eugene Gilbert, "A CASTE, A CULTURE, A MARKET" to Marx and Engels' Conditions of the Working-Class in England to Mayhew's London labour and the London poor to Ranter and Muggletonian pamphlets and broadsheets. This mutlimedia course had the listening component highlighted below and a film series including Cromwell, Matewan, Blackboard Jungle, If . . ., Berkeley in the 60s, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, The Decline of Western Civilization, and Valley Girl.

Tape 1

Side A
Traffic: John Barleycorn
Billy Bragg: The World Turned Upside Down
Steeleye Span: Padstow
Ewan MacColl: London's Lottery/London Mourning in Ashes
Billy Bragg: The Red Flag
Steeleye Span: The Weaver and the Factory Girl
Elvis Presley: Mystery Train/Jailhouse Rock
Chuck Berry: No Particular Place to Go

Side B
The Charlatans: Codine
Great Society: Somebody to Love
Count Five:Psychotic Reaction
The Electric Prunes: I had too much to dream (Last Night)
The Chambers Bros.: Time Has Come Today
The Sex Pistols: Anarchy in the U.K./God Save the Queen/Holidays in the Sun/Belsen was a gas
The Clash: 1977
X: Los Angeles

Tape 2

Side A
Black Flag: TV Party
Suicidal Tendencies:Institutionalized
Joy Division: Decades
The Smiths: That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
R.E.M.: Radio Free Europe
New Order: Blue Monday
Public Image Limited: Rise
Depeche Mode: Policy of Truth

Side B
The Screaming Trees: Flashes
The Wedding Present: Take me
Ultra Vivid Scene: Special One
Nine Inch Nails: Head Like A Hole
Verdi: Ernani: Addio

Funkfest

Side A
James Brown-Cold Sweat/ There was a Time
Sly & the Family Stone-Sing a Simple Song/Thank You
K. C. & the Sunshine Band-Get Down Tonight
Parliament- Give up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)/ Flashlight
Rick James- Super Freak
Funkadelic- Maggot Brain
Maze with Frankie Beverly-Love is The Key

Side B
Ground Zero-Lettin Ya Know P-Mix
Fishbone-So Many Millions/Ma & Pa
Limbomaniacs-Butt Funkin'
Red Hot Chili Peppers-Give it Away/Knock Me Down
Dot 3-Throwin' Bones
Psychefunkapus-Jesus Crispies/A New Beginning
Primus-Fizzle Fry/Too Many Puppies
Skankin' Pickle-Doin' Something Naughty
Jane's Addiction-Don't Stop

Press the eject and give me the tape.

O.K., So a pre-recorded copy of Journey, Infinity is the one that doesn't belong in these three photos. Just wanted to make a historical point: Journey and Neal Schon were cool way before Milch ended The Sopranos and "Don't U Forget About ME"! Inspiration for this entry comes from Rob Sheffield, Thurston Moore, Robin James, John Oswald, Nick Hornby, DiMo, Ben D., Blue Velvet and everbody ever at KZSU, Dane Johnson, Gleester, and Jeff Erickson @ Stanford, Gorjus, Gene Clark, Kicker of Elves, Alec Eiffel, Sally J. Nordan, the Rev. Joey "the tape of GEL" Pensak @ Mississippi State, the whole gang @ URY but especially Simon and Stephen H (as below will make clear) and all other contributors to the art of the cassette mix tape.

Like I said last week I was "digging in the dirt" well rearranging a closet and I came across a bunch of old cassettes. You remember them, they were after vinyl but before CDs. Yeah I know I already made that same lame - - - joke in the last blog entry. So sue me, my "professional" writing staff are on a picket line outside Black Rock. This is such a rich topic that I'm gonna preview it today and spend the rest of the week highlighting the three eras of my mix tape existence.

Here's a small catalogue/photo essay/playlist of some of my absolute favorite old mix tapes. From the all vinyl all the time mixing-board eras at URY and KZSU right through the CD revolution to the cusp of the digital encoding revolution. ca. 2001/2. Unless otherwise stated all tapes compiled by G E Light. I won't discuss my Harvard -era party mixes (1981-5) as I consider them juvenalia only and of little histoical interest.

1985-6 The URY Years

State of the Nation (9/11/86) compiler: Stephen Humphries
Untitled (Fall 1986) Compiler: Simon Aldous
[Motown Mix] (stolen from out of my 1984 Jetta in the Blackwelder Parking Lot, Escondido Village, Stanford along with the car's original Am-Fm Cassette radio and thus deleted; BTW, Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, Fugazi, and Dischord Records fame lived in the same grad student housing village as a kid or so the story goes; hale and farewell to a fellow DIYer)
Brit Sounds* *Irish, too/Funky Soul/Solely Funk
"A Mixed Bag" Tape: Rock Comp/Soul-Funk Comp


I've blogged elsewhere about my first radio station. Somehow I stayed away from 'HRB as an undergrad, my bad!

One special one I want to share today:

Sonya's Sisters Solidarity Mix

That should really read Sonja, my "double secret probation" bad.



Sonja Lyubomirsky

I hope like Altered Image's fetching Clare Grogran aka The "real" Gregory' Girl, "she [Sonja] could be happy" with the following play list! I should mention this is seven years before Lillith Fair, having been produced on October 7, 1990.







Side A

Billie Holiday-All or Nothing At All
Aretha Franklin-Respect
Freda Payne-Band of Gold
Sinead O'Connor-The Last Day of Our Acquaintance
Everything But The Girl-Apron Strings
Kate Bush-This Women's Work
Voice of the Beehive-The Beat of Love
Penelope Houston-Bed of Lies
Julie Cruise-Falling
Sarah McLachlan-Steaming
Kirsty MacColl-You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby
Consolidated-Dysfunctional Relationship

Side B

Eurythmics w/Aretha-Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves
Nancy Sinatra-These Boots Are Made for Walking
Queen Latifah w/De La Soul-Mama Gave Birth to the Soul Children
Sarah Vaughan-The Sweetest Sounds
Patti Smith-Gloria
X-Ray Spex-Germfree Adolescents
We've Got a Fuzzbox (and We're Gonna Use It)-XXsexx
The Slits-Typical Girls
Barbara Manning-Every Pretty Girl
Michelle Shocked-My Little Sister
2 Nice Girls-I Spent my Last$10.00 on Birth Control And Beer

Sonja Lyubomirsky was born in Russia, emigrated to the States and graduated summa cum laude in pyschology from Harvard (1989). She started at Stanford, when I was halfway through my decade there and lived in the same dorm complex, Rains Houses, where I was Head Graduate Resident Assistant. It remains a vibrant social haven for bedraggled graduate students as Rains E-Drops, the dorm's online newsletter attests. Of course, back in the day we had an annual social budget of $78,900.00 what with 789 residents at $25/individual/quarter. That buys a lot of Price Club jumbo popcorn bags, believe me! Below are some typical Rains colloquia:



Marjo says "Darn That Price Club Popcorn!"



Rains Housing Office Courtyard

If memory serves, Sonja lived downstairs in the first building on the right; she certainly laid out on this green, not a sight soon forgotten.



Another Midweek Graduate Seminar, Rains Houses, Willis Courtyard



Rains Hidden Valley BBQ, July 1990
Don Fujino on the extreme left was my longtime Rains 12A Roommate. He did a PhD in High Energy Physics at SLAC and now is at back in the Bay Area researching at Lawrence Livermore Labs or so I last heard. We'll be seeing a lot more of Don to follow. He made his blog photo debut as "a Cluster of Grapes" here. The Stanford Baseball Player in that photo was Martha Meaney now Murray, who is a highly respected Orthopedic Surgeon at Childen's Hospital Boston and an assistant professor of orhopedic surgery at the Harvard Medical School.



Grillin' w/ Big Bones, Willis Courtyard



The Famous Sequel: Big Bones BBQ II in Willis Courtyard



Rains Community Service Team Cleans Up Pescadero State Beach



At the Stanford Community Carnival Behind Rinconada



Some of My GRA Staff in action outside Willis Lounge



Don & GE outside Rains 12A, Halloween 1991



Rains Pumpkin Carving Contest, Halloween 1991
The winner was, of course, the pictured EE grad student who wore his creation on his head . . . and in a lanslide.



"Caesar" Don, Rains Ski Trip



Rains Heavenly Ski Trip, Sunset over Tahoe, March 1992



The Better Half, Rains Casino Nite Staff, Hacienda Commons



Charades from Hell, GRA Staff Training, Bodega Bay, 2001



Rains GRA Staff, Angel Island, 1993



Do The Lindy 101



And finally . . . 'ritas @ Rains Party 14C

Yup we played only slightly less hard than we worked, studied, and researched. Sonja and I both graduated with PhDs in 1994. She's been a very successful Professor of Pschology at UC Riverside for a hopefully lucky 13 years. Not sure about that crosstown/cross valley Santa Monica to Riverside commute on the 10 though! Next year when the following book really drops, she could become a PHENOMEMNON making the circuit from Oprah to Leno to Dave and onwards . . .



The KZSU Studio B-era

The vast majority of my mix tapes hapened here, but then I lived in the Bay Area for 10 years from 22 to 32 years of age and had total access to KZSU's incredible vinyl treasure trove not to mention briefly a coveted station-wide master key. Perhaps the largest record library in the Bay Area, even if fully a sixth of it is in hard-to-access deep storage cardboard boxes.

Rock Mix/Jazz Mix ca. 1987
Da Berg (The Oak Creek Mix) 1/15/96--last mix made in Palo Alto
S.F. Seen 5/21/90
Blue & Black 3/21/90
38A Quake! 11/3/89 17 Days after this which I helped clean up on the 14th
The Best of Wednesday Night Live: Second Anniversary Special compilers: Ben D. and Steve V.
Halloween 10/31/88
selected $WINGIN' UTTER$ compiler: Dane Johnson

[Dane also happened to be Kevin the original bass player's MA Thesis chair at SFSU; Wickersham wrote about Turiya -- a Sanskrit literary/theological concept -- compared with Jouissance. Dane writes, "I agreed to chair the thesis only if he promised never to include mention of either concept directly or indirectly in any Swingin' Utters song. He agreed." Wickersham more recently has been in SF's The Workin' Stiffs]

Starkvegas and my cd to cassette mixes: The NAD 6325 era AKA pre-Nero, pre-iTunes, pre-MP3s

The local mix tape culture had 2 epicenters, often overlapping, The English Department at Mississippi State and WMSV also on campus. These tapes often come with the odd vinyl track played through a Denon Dp-25F turntable. And they tend to have some space between tracks, as I didn't have a mixing board or fader handy when constructing them.

The Sub 3:00 Mix/The Summer of Love Mix 7/7/98
Local NE MS Music 3/6/00
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Peel (local indie rock from the Golden Triangle) 4/3/01
Light Shakespeare 8/26/97
In A Country State of Mind 8/1/97
SAA in Bay Area Mix Easter 1999 3/29/99
the tape of GEL compiler: Joey Pensak ca. 6/2000
The Dee-n-Wendy BV mix 2/5/01
Brit Pop Mix 5/1/3/99
Jabber Rock 2001 Mix 4/24/01


Next Time URY and Stephen and Simon's competing takes on the the "State of the Nation" UK, Fall 1986.

Sad Coda 9:28 pm CST

Sonya's Sisters Solidarity Mix is dead, long live the mix. As old tapes are wont to do, it slowed down but kept spooling out tape. It was on a techno track by Consolidated so it didn't sound to weird at first. I was across the room. By the time I realized what was up, it was too late. The tape split as I sprinted boomboxwards. I guess I'll just have to virtually recreate the thing from MP3s. C'est La Vie.

The book I read.

Who's tripping down the streets of the city
Smilin' at everybody she sees
Who's reachin' out to capture a moment
Everyone knows it's Windy

And Windy has stor-my eyes
That flash at the sound of lies
And Windy has wings to fly
Above the clouds (above the clouds)
Above the clouds (above the clouds)

"Windy," The Association

An association copy is a special copy of a book owned by somebody associated with its author and providing a true provenance.

According to the web site of The Chaucer Head Bookshop in Stratford-Upon-Avon:

ASSOCIATION COPY
Books once belonging to the author, signed or annotated by the author, or someone associated with the author of book in some way. Book inscribed by author to famous person, or owned by someone of interest, or someone connected to the book or author.

I have collected books since I could read at the age of three. This is a small gallery of my association copies. I don't have a staggering collection like this former Stanford English Professor. I was never a student of Jay's in any proper sense of the word. But during my decade in Northern California, I came to cherish our casual conversations around Building 40 and in the Green stacks about books, history and popular culture. I can attest to Jay's wide-ranging brilliance like his "Real" students. This visual essay is in a small way my tribute to some things he taught me.

Willie Morris, The Courting of Marcus Dupree. Cloth 1st edition. Excellent.

One of my absolute favorite books written near here about several phenomena arising out of Neshoba County and the infamous town of Philadelphia. Here he displays his love of the "place" of the South:

.
Elsewhere I have written of my own affair with my home region.

I first met Willie, when he addressed a Welty Weekend crowd at the "W" and attended a post-speech dinner at President Rent's home as the guest/escort of Dr. Ann Balazs. Her husband, my good friend Peter Wood, was out of town on a professional trip.




After dinner Willie and I were secreted away in the library with a little Bourbon and we talked and talked of football (especially the essential brilliance of Herschel Walker in Athens) and favorite Southern Authors (George Washington Cable, Thomas Wolfe, Lewis Nordan . . .). This is probably my rarest and most valuable association copy. Here's what Lemuria says an unsigned first edition is worth. It certainly is my favorite one!



Maurice Sendak, Where The Wild Things Are. Cloth 1st edition. Fine.

A Funny Story
Sendak was at Harvard for one of those one month visits where he was lecturing to Theater students about the sets for his recent opera in NY. He did a small House reception in Currier that I was lucky enough to finagle an invitation to. I asked him to autography my copy of the book. He asked my name and I replied, "N...No, just your signature, please." He got quite huffy in that paranoid Joisey/New Yawk way. "Who was I? Did I think he was a putz? Should he sign the book just so I could sell it?" I calmly pointed out that I had had the book since it was first published in the 1960s, that he didn't know me and writing some hackneyed cliche to (fill in the blank) went against everything his art stood for, and that I swore on my Mother's honor never to sell this book. He relented, graciously pointing out both my chutzpah and my reasoning skills. Maurice, I stand true to my word 23 years later. Your book holds pride of place in the section of my great uncles' green lawyer book cases—where I store they very best of my children's literature collection, and there it will remain until I die. Unless of course I or some kid is reading it. That after all is the The POINT!


Here's a shot of the book and the cover story on Sendak's visit in my old college paper, the weekly Indy.



The Collected Ann Kirn.

Ann was a professor of Art Education at Florida State University and my neighbor atop the heights of San Luis Ridge, where we both lived and where DeSoto probably wintered for the first Christmas in North America by a non-pagan. She both writes and draws her books, often drawing on what would now be trendy multicultural sources (Congo folk tales/anthropology/biological animal traces and the like). There is a wisdom, simplicity, and beauty in her work that has seldom been matched. That they are all out of print is a criminal indictment of the publishing industry in America today who only wants the new, not THE BEST.

In a Garden Cloth. 1st Edition. Fine.

Either this one, Beeswax Catches a Thief, or I Spy were my childhood favorites.





The Rest



My very first association copy from 1968, when I was 4.



A six-year old's favorite new book.



Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverly Novels. Cloth. First edition. Excellent.



Alexander Welsh took his Ph.D. in English from Harvard, studying under Albert Guerrard, Jr. This is a presentation copy of the book that arose from his thesis. The story of how I now possess it required Al to leave Harvard and return to his ancestral, childhood campus of Stanford. No skullduggery was involved. When I arrived at Stanford in September 1986, Albert was an eminence grise in both senses of the phrase. Retired to his beautiful campus estate, he cleared out his library by donating it to the book sales fundraisers run out of Meyers undergraduate library. I was lucky enough to snag this very special book. Especially special to me, since my undergraduate History and Literature thesis, "The Novel Uprising: Sir Walter Scott and Revolution", relied on it heavily as an Ur-Text. I know Jay would have been proud that I found and snagged it for something like $0.75. Should Professor Welsh see this, the book is rightfully yours now and all you have to do is ask . . . even if you have gone over to the Dark Side up there in New Haven.



Simon Frith, Sound Effects. Paper. 1st edition. Fine.

I taught one of the first popular classes on rock and roll in the English Department at Stanford. One set of students even formed their own punk band for a presentation, which was suitably loud and annoying (I believe they only knew two chords!) to the Latin and Greek classes happening at the same time in the building 70 of the Stanford Quad.



Donald Mabry beat me to the punch by a decade here in the Golden Triangle. When he retired he graciously doubled the size of my then popular music collection with the contents of his personal library. This was my favorite new edition because I had first heard Simon lecture in 1986 at the University of York with an early version of his and Angela McRobbie's work on rock and sexuality. Since that time I have carried on a very pleaurable, if intermittent correpsondence with Simon about everything from the essential brilliance of the Gamble and Huff 45s of the early 1970s to the trouble with phasing on AM radio as another influence on Kevin Shield's tonal palette for Loveless. Simon is an extremely kind person who has often offered me encouragement to continue working on and thinking about popular music.



Lewis Carroll. Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.
Cloth NY Undated (as early as 1895 and no later than the 1920s). Fine with 50 illustrations by John Tenniel.



The most special book in my collection. It was first owned by one Elizabeth McBride of Roanoke, VA. In the early 1940s, she gave it to her daughter, Jenn Kosko (as the pencilled-in inscription reads). In 1984, she gave it to her son, George Evans Light, then of Cambridge, MA. Someday, he will pass it along to the right son or daughter.



Marcus Mabry, White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas. Cloth 1st edition.

Marcus was a student in the very first section I ever taught of George Brown's "History of the English Language" class. He is now a famous ex-patriate Newsweeek Senior Contributor. Back then he was a little more "Super Fly!" The inscription references that class section.





We were all a little thinner and with bigger hair back then . . .





and finally two by Greil Marcus. First up Mystery Train Paper. 2nd Edition Revised. Fine.



I got this book signed at Kepler's in Menlo Park after a reading for the paperback version of Dead Elvis which is significant for several reasons. First, it was Greil's childhood haunt. Second, it is one of the Bay Area's great independent bookstores. Thirdly, Greil was a key supporter in bringing Kepler's back as a collectively-owned and run indy bookstore. For that act alone, he is a MENSCH!



and finally Lipstick Traces. Cloth 1st Edition. Excellent.



He kindly signed this at his 1991 reading of Invisible Republic at the late lamented Printer's Inc. on California Avenue in Palo Alto. Sorry Greil, I always refer to the book's original titles.



One of two books, that along with that continual moneymaker The Loeb Classical Library Green and Red series, kept Harvard University Press not only afloat but rampant during a difficult period for academic publishing. The other was of course Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, based on the lectures she gave at Radcliffe in 1983, that I was lucky enough to hear. Apparently that copy even unsigned has some value!

Doubles

A brief word about the multiple ownwership of the same book (be it exactly identical editions or not). That's why they call you a bibliophile. I don't try to set records, but my personal one is 4: 2 1967 1st pressings of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's (mine and William A. McClung's), a 1981 reissue that doesn't skip, and the mid-90s era CD release. Below is my best doubled association copy of E. M. W. Tillyard's classic The Elizabethan World Picture. When I first moved to Starkville, I haunted the stacks of Mitchell Memorial Library not having much else to do and befriended the soon-to-be-retired William P. Allan, a reference librarian, who specialized in Early Modern English literature and history. Nearing retirement, he offered to let me cherry pick his collection. He was proud of owning the Tillyard book. I didn't have the heart to tell him I had a 2nd copy that actually still had most of the paper dusk jacket intact. Here's all I know about R. F. Elmes. When he died, he sold his book estate to a shop in Ripon, North Yorkshire (St. Margaret's 10-11 Kirkgate on the Minster Square), where I found it and acquired a number of classic mid-century texts by such authors as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S Lewis, J. E. Neale, G. E. Bentley, Douglas Bush (whew finally somebody without initials) and — wait... for... it — G. R. Elton.






Finally a Note About Mistakes (i.e. Capital Alienated From Labour) after Marx

For collectors, especially numismatists and philatelists, mistakes are where the real action is. The same can be said for some areas of English Literature. Obviously Charlton Hinman made a career out of the variations in the First Folio of Shakespeare (1623). I had an extraordinary copy of a book which I lost in the blind attempt to replace it with a corrected text. Ah, the folly of youth. You see I had the mother of all screwed up paperback editions of Simon Schama's masterly The Embarassment of Riches. And how appropriate a title as we shall see. In a book of 698 pages, I had 4 lengthy sections of an average of 75 pages completely missing. What?!? you mean The War of Spanish Succession is just a myth! In their places, one section repeated the same 15 page run over and over and over and over and over until it ended with its final quire missing. So no holy hosanna coda . . . Another one read like Schama was riffing on Sterne or Cortazar: its pagination ran 698, 697, 696, 666(!), 403, 404, 333, 334, 207, 91 et cetera et cetera et cetera. If I'd only I been a bit wiser on that trip to "Bezerkeley" and not visited the UC Press Book Shop in a snit, I'd still have this not-so-small gem of an "edition," rather than seeing it be pulped. Now whomever produced it surely is the working definition of alienated labor. But perhaps the Bard was right in reminding us that Rumour

is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it.
King Henry IV Part II, "Induction"

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Here endeth the discourse on association.