La Maison du Couchant Fumieres

I am making it official. Tomorrow is the day that Nigel Patel joins us here at Chateau Cerise.
Hopefully he is able to overlook really bad French. Among other things.

Recent AM earworms

In no particular order:
Master Blaster - Stevie Wonder
Fish & Chips & Vinegar - Children's Song
Blackberry Way - The Move
Moon Over Parma - Drew Carey

21

I counted. That’s how many articles of clothing I had on today at the bus stop. Yet I was still freezing me yarbles off. I really like “5” weather. When that’s the max I have on. The car is dead at the moment. We’ll try again tomorrow.

Soup -n- Stew day

French Onion Provencal (my own invention)
Beef Stew scented with burgundy
Because it's serious winter here and all I seem to want to do is drink Emergen-C and eat clementines and soup.

Mmm-Mmm Meropoix

C-C-Cleaver C-C-Crazy

and I just lo-o-o-ve my mandoline
(This was my first time really utilizing my Chinese cleaver)

What I did for New Years

I made fabulous new altar cloths that match the turquoise in my beautiful Jewel Heart yard sale wooden screen. Then I used a good chunk of my Xmas money and bought a new red rug and red cushions for the bench in front of the altar. Then I cleaned the whole area and made all the offerings fresh, new and semi-permanent.

I find myself just sitting in there now just to hang out. It’s pretty inspiring. I think it’s just beautiful.

What? No Soul Train?

WTF? So I have to clean for four hours instead? Meh.

Skate/No Skate

Here’s the thing. I am an Ann Arbor living, home owning, property tax paying, (solitary, street) skater. I am not behind the current A2 Skate park initiative. The primary reason is GET A FREAKING CLUE SKATE DOLTS. They are having to close facilities like LIBRARIES around here because there is no frickin’ money. Do I think existing libraries (not to mention services like The United Way) are more important than potential skate parks? Why yes, yes I do. Wake up from yer white boy beds of privilege. If you can personally afford it then by all means, continue to build yer boys own. Put down the pipe and smell the coffee, we can’t afford it at this time.

As well as:
Then you will be able to fully indulge your control freak cravings; banning, denying and disclaiming upon those you deem not cool enough, to yer hearts content. Past behaviors makes that appear to be the actual most important focus of yer boys club anyway. Well, that and the Boozy Mess Club activity roster.

By all means, keep putting together good shows, there’s no argument there. But what is going to happen to all these alleged fundraising monies, should they exist, once this idea has been tabled until the recession is over? BTW where can we find the accountings publicly posted?

From lowest to highest denominator

Or why I really am kind of a snoot.
I totally need cheezeburgers in my life. Even when (as been happening more often lately) I am not so very interested in the meat eating rituals, a charcoal grilled cheezeburger or Blimpy or Kosmo burger will totally do it for me.
Also there is a dish served at many super yupscale, French/Italian, restaurants pairing some superlative cut of beef, like tenderloin, with gorgonzola. Yummy. Something about the stinkiness of bleu with blood red meat is just fine.

Which brings us to nachos. Nachos, too, are swell. I have long maintained that this is the reason for cattle mutilations, crop circles and alien visitation in general. Meat, corn, cheeze = Nachos. We’ve got em and the universe wants them. I think Daniel Pinkwater would back me up on this. The question of the meat on the nachos is one of quality though. Many, many, times they must remain a lacto-ovo vegetarian production as at 98% of restaurants, I just won’t touch their meat.

But other than these extremes, the idea of putting cheeze on meat is just weird. (See the commercial for Campbell's cheesy chicken and rice casserole.) Almost barbaric. It’s sort of like the idea of drinking kumiss. Which I suppose is technically not that different from drinking Bailey’s. But these new, flavoured, Bailey’s, such as Chocolate mint and caramel, are purely cretinous. And a chocolatini is not a fuggin’ martini you silly calf.

PS I believe this post wins the prize for the most words ever I had to teach my spellcheck.

So it was Magazine all along

Having spent the last 22 years under a complete misapprehension, that there was a song I needed in my life called Permafrost by Celtic Frost, I have, at long last, been set to rights. You may blame UBU for drawing the scales from my eyes. Commence fault finding now.

Permafrost
By Howard Devoto

Thunder shook loose hail
on the outhouse again
Today I bumped into you again
I have no idea what you want
but there was something I meant to say
As the day stops dead
at the place where we’re lost
I will drug you and fuck you on the permafrost
There’s not much I miss
I’m far too forgetful for that
Sugar’s sweet some of the time
it’s hard to keep some things in mind
As the day stops dead
at the place where we’re lost
I will drug you and fuck you
on the permafrost



PS As usual, alcohol is much to blame for my addlepatedness

Awesome earworm

All bright and cheery, Mucus - Borax. That, coupled with a deeply satisfying poop, seems like a great start to the morning.

I think

I officially quit Poetry Club. I am really convinced there is a funk there. Some kind of reverse snobbery thing. Go figure! Snobbery at POETRY Club?

Horrendous

This is my new favourite toothpaste. It is a weird dark green. And the taste. Ooo. Awful in a way that only Asian toothpaste can be. It’s a blend of Neem (have you ever tasted Neem? ‘Orrible just ‘orrible. I have a bottle of Neem oil here if anyone cares to try). And then it is sweetened with really strong Acacia. Whoo!
And this just makes it so freakin’ pungent and weird. Which of course means it’s a million times better than the fruity or minty bubblegummy wretchedness that is American toothpaste brands.

Reversion

Fug. For the last two days it’s been all like “Baby I’ma Wantchou” or Elton John’s “Sad Songs” or “Bluer Than Blue”. Just some intensely craptastic, soft rock, reoccurring nightmares from the 70’s and 80’s. No wonder the kids would rather praise Satan.

Bizactly

Well our friend UBU was right, the earworm 90’s are here.
Yesterday it was Danzig - 777 (circa 1990)
Today it’s Seal - Crazy (circa 1991)

I remember calling WCBN and requesting Danzig - Under Her Black Wings. Then being chastised on air by the DJ for asking her to play something so Satanic. And that she was absolutely refusing. Of course it’s Satanic, it’s Danzig for cripes sake, that’s his whole schtick.
But I guess we all have to draw our line in the sand somewhere. Mine is just that I won’t directly put money in his pocket. I’ll buy the stuff (rarely) used only. (I do have a fondness for Lucifuge for instance). It’s that voice. It’s just really, really, good. Rarely do you find such an amazing male singer. He just happens to use his for evil. Not the “Satan is my master” kind of evil. I could care less about that. One probably has to be or ever have been, an Xtian to get in a snit about that. My beef is that he exploits the disturbed children for monetary gain. And I have suspicions that he is likely to have even less discretion when it comes to sexual exploitation.

It is, I think, somewhat of an honour to be banned from WCBN. My band Skinflower, was, in the very late 80’s. We had a six song demo on which we did a cover of Carol King’s “He Hit Me”. (Phil Specter, of course, had picked it up and had the Crystals record it. Later, after we played with the very early incarnation of Babes In Toyland somehow Courtney Love ended up doing an eerily similar to ours version, go figure). Anyway apparently the radical feminist element down at the station have no sense of satire or humour at all. I also don’t think they had enough of an actual musical education to realize it was a cover. So they had our entire demo and us as an entity, banned. An honour indeed but not particularly helpful to our local career trajectory. That’s ok, we imploded due to severe personality conflicts a couple of years later anyway.

Ahhh relief

We’ve moved into the later eighties. Nothing but federalism was in my brain when I opened my eyes. But as the cat brekkie was being prepared and the kettle was sizzling, a Shriekback song started forming.
These eyes are blind
This is the real thing
something something something
fragile as anything
We had some good (machines, routines?)
But they don’t work no more
something something instrumental interlude

Yup

Skool seems so far so ok.
I read terrible things about the psych. teacher on “rate my professor”, but he seems all right so far.
Interesting system in Poli Sci. Grading based solely on the 3 exams. If you get an A on the first 2 and donate an hour a week after the first one as a study group leader, you get an automatic A on the third. I think I’m going to have to try for that.

Today is field geology. Tomorrow I start Philosophy of Religion. Time will tell.

Meanwhile I had some Robert Palmer earwurmage today. “Some Like It Hot”. Apparently it’s the attack of the 70’s and 80’s. There was, however, a Dead Meadow morning a few days ago but since I don’t know the names of any of the songs I couldn’t document it.

Good news

By changing the title on the previous post from just “cripes” to “cripes chief” I was able to supplant all the dangling wurms with “The Danger Mouse Theme Song” which, as I know from experience, is completely more bearable for 6 or 7 hours than any Damned late 70’s soft rock.

Cripes Chief

Even the earworms have sucked of late.
Today: Don’t Give Up On Us Baby - Who’s that? I think David frickin’ Soul gahhh
Yesterday: It’s a Heartache - Bonnie Tyler
Before that: The H-O-T-W-I-R-E jingle which went on all day long, while mixing with the song Terrence and Phillip sang on the Ed Sullivan show, which in my mind was something about chicken and peas.

And now having reflected on them, they are all there, looping through each other, the intentioned and un-intentioned dregs of musical achievement, squirming and wurming through my skull.
Double, triple, feh.

And I’m trebly thrilled as today is back to school day.
Gripe, gripe, gripe. Grump, grump, grump.

Blog-o-phobia

I don’t exactly know what’s going on here but suddenly the blog has come to represent - something else, something problematic. Allen Ginsburg said that “things are symbols of themselves”. Maybe I’m just not getting that on the “meta” level, but for me things are usually symbols of something else altogether. The result being that I constantly am doing the psychic gymnastics of robbing Peter to pay Paul in the act of balancing what gets done and what hangs fire.

Any piece of paperwork or act of responsibility becomes a tower of outcomes, relationships, and probably most damaging of all, power dynamics. Scaling those towers or bringing them into any kind of proper perspective is intensely fraught with - “stuff”.
Here are things that end up on the view side of the electron microscope of my neurosis's:
The phone
The mail
College paperwork
Assignments
Work paperwork
Taxes
The bills
Changing services, starting new services
Cleaning
Dharma
Writing

There’s probably more but those are the completely blatant examples. For me, no cigar has ever been just a cigar, if you know what I mean. The power dynamic and who has it runs me, a lot. I wonder whether this is generally a womens issue or whether men have it as well since the power trip really does affect all of us peons?

Fruity am earworm

Oranges and Lemons (Sing the bells of St. Clemens) with the occasional “Now bring us some figgy puddin’” leaping into the fray.

Oliver hands

Jets

Keyboards

Inexplicable AM Earworm

Just A Closer Walk With Thee - Sung by a man initially, but when I started thinking about it, it changed to the Patsy Cline version.

Which begs the question - Why would I be hearing an obscure (to me) version which only changes to a well known (to me) version when I focus? Seems that is some indication of more complexity to the earworm phenomena than I usually accredit. Such as, possibly it has connections to a really deep part of the memory and subconscious. Or perhaps sometimes, (for me anyway) it’s picking up stuff from “outside”. Interesting questions if anyone (but me) gives a fig.