Friday, November 16, 2007

YOU ROCK, YOU ROLL, & YOU BOOGIE

So far, November has been the most perfect October. Even at night, the temps are hardly oppressive and the leaves are still changing color with many of the trees becoming more and more and more golden. It's snowed two or three times -- which I haven't minded -- but it's rained a couple times too. It's raining today. Quite a beautiful world even if the seasons don't seem normal.

Unfortunately, I've been partially laid up with a bad cold and not out riding my bike in the weather. This isn't the worst cold -- the three-month colds I've had every winter for the past three years will have to duke it out for that honor -- but it's made an impact I'm hoping means I won't get hit for three months come December. Still, the kind weather is sadly lost on me.

During the first and perhaps worst night of my illness, Erin and I watched Last Tango in Paris. Geezus... where do these movies come from? How do they visit me only when I'm sick? After Brando had Maria Schneider's fingers up his anus and went on about how she should get fucked by a pig (and so on and so forth -- and no, he didn't mean a cop!), I was reminded of how my cock practically ascended into my body during the horse handjob scene in Emanuelle in America (see: turn off). Sadly, in my haze, I decided the anal rape scene in Omen III was preferable to Schneider's search for Brando's "bosom of desire".

Ahem, well, moving on:

One of the many unfortunate repercussions of a co-worker getting canned at the shop was the disappearance of Gil Evan's Out of the Cool album. Evans arranged Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain -- a feverish, poly-chordal masterpiece based around the classical piece "Concierto de Aranjuez" -- which I'd first heard at at Dave's house at age 17. Sketches of Spain was a true brainbender that served as the perfect soundtrack to my teenage insomnia: it was the only tape I wanted to listen to after not sleeping for more than three out of 72 hours. Out Of The Cool is a stunner too, especially about 15-20 seconds right around the middle: the dissonant swell that ends "Bilbao Song", a pause, and then the jolting, Lydian horn arrangement that opens "Stratusphunk".

[Speaking of music, apparently MBV is reuniting to play some shows! Was it columnist Andrew Earles that rightly compared the career of MBV with that of G'N'R? Almost ten years ago, at a defunct Royal Oak record store, I overheard a well-dressed twentysomething say, "I hear My Bloody Valentine are finally finishing up an album...." Man, I wanted to projectile vomit. In the intervening years, that line has been repeated ad infinitum by many other jerks with nothing better to talk about. ]

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