Record Store Day

[Click for larger stickers.]

Yesterday was Record Store Day, and I went to Exile on Main Street in Champaign, Illinois. The store is long and narrow, and the line of (mostly younger) people moving into and through the store and back up to the register never let up. Shopping was a matter of filing slowly, slowly, past the merchandise and stopping to browse when appropriate. (It made me remember filing past the Pietà at the New York World’s Fair.) I spent about an hour, a pleasant hour, to get what I had come for, a 180-gram vinyl reissue of Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle (a Record Store Day exclusive).

And there were stickers. In the second row from the bottom, on the right, Taj Mahal’s The Natch’l Blues (1968), reissued on 180-gram vinyl for the Day. I bought that album not long after it came out — I must have been twelve or thirteen. Still have it. Still works good.

A related post
Record stores

A post for the day

My day, today: meeting with two students, prepping and teaching three classes, responding to several e-mails. And what else? Watching the news on television early this morning and, later, reading the news online and hitting refresh, and hitting refresh. The post I planned to make this morning is still a draft: I just could not bring myself to put it online.

It is difficult to think of making a blog post — or at least one far removed from current events — in the face of horrific news. And yet the world is filled with horrific news daily, and life goes on. With Boston, the news is especially close to my heart. It stops everything. And everything I can think to say about it can be thought and said by countless other observers.

In a class this morning devoted to Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, I played some relevant music from Bessie Smith. There are people, I said to my students, whose work is to perpetrate suffering, and there are people whose work is to create joy. Musicians are engaged in that second endeavor.

Music I have found myself returning to again and again this week: Mavis Staples, Nick Lowe, and Wilco rehearsing “The Weight.” I watched a couple of times when it came online last year. I don’t know what made me seek out this performance now. You might like it too.

The post I had planned to put online today concerns an episode of The Paper Chase with some great dialogue about education, love, marriage, and Earl Grey tea. I will post it next week.

“Not the American way”

Gabrielle Giffords on yesterday’s Senate vote:

This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.

Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.

Sriracha ≠ mayonnaise

David Tran, founder of Huy Fong Foods Inc. and maker of Sriracha sauce: “Hot sauce must be hot. If you don't like it hot, use less. We don't make mayonnaise here.”

This post is for my son Ben, hardcore Sriracha user.

Word of the day: roach

The word of the day is roach:

Downstairs, on a bracket shelf next to a vase with hand-painted pink roses on it, there is a matching picture of him, taken at the same time. His hair is roached and he is wearing a high stiff collar, and hardly anything shows in his face but his Welsh ancestry.

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980).

It’s an American verb. The Oxford English Dictionary explains:

1803: “To clip or trim (a horse’s mane) close to the neck so the hair stands on end; to give (a horse) a roach mane.” The verb derives from a nautical noun: “an upward curve cut in to the foot of a square sail," and later, “a curved or convex part of a fore-and-aft sail extending beyond a straight line between any two of its three corners, especially on the leech side.”

By 1833 the verb applied to human hairstyling: “To brush or cut (hair) in a roach.”

By 1872, there was a noun: “A hairstyle in which the hair is brushed so as to stand up or sweep back from the face; a roll or wave of hair.”

The OED citations include a great sentence from Langston Hughes (1950): “Her head was all done fresh and shining with a hair-rocker roached up high in front.”

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Other word-of-the-day posts (Pinboard)

Mondegreen, fixed

“When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter collides aligns with Mars,” and so on.

As my wife Elaine pointed out to me, Jupiter cannot collide with Mars. Okay, if you say so. But also: in the face of such a collision, it makes no sense to speak of peace guiding the planets and love steering the stars.

I misunderstood this lyric for years, despite the Fifth Dimension’s impeccable diction.

Recently updated

Little Outliner Now with Dropbox syncing.

Colbert, Kennedy, poetry

Stephen Colbert and Caroline Kennedy recited poems to, or at, one another on last night’s Report. The fun begins at 15:05.

It occurs to me that The Colbert Report must be the most genuinely arts-oriented half-hour on television.

Bob Wolff’s archive

Seventy-four years in sports broadcasting: Bob Wolff’s archive goes to the Library of Congress.

[I remember the New York Knicks on Channel 9, Bob Wolff doing the play-by-play and Cal Ramsey doing the color commentary. Glory days.]

Alan Wilson, The Blind Owl

Alan Wilson (1943–1970) was to Canned Heat what another Wilson, Brian, was to the Beach Boys: the musical genius in residence. Out today from Severn Records, The Blind Owl, a two-CD compilation of Canned Heat tracks featuring Wilson’s guitar, harmonica, and voice.

I have to say it: this release includes a short piece about Alan Wilson by me. There are also track-by-track notes by the Heat’s longtime manager Skip Taylor. Me, a writer of liner notes: something I never imagined when I began listening to Canned Heat more than forty years ago.

And the Heat plays on, with Fito de la Parra, Harvey Mandel, Dale Spalding, and Larry Taylor: a venerable foursome.

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Alan Wilson
Canned Heat in Illinois
Hooker ’n Heat

[I have found that on days like today, music is the one thing that helps.]