This is the first I've seen the video for "Money For Nothing." Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, dir.) said nothing ages a movie faster than its computer graphics. Then Toy Story came along and changed viewer expectations. After Toy Story even a high-profile movie like Hoodwinked looked "cheap."
Anyway, the video for "Money For Nothing" used to be known for its computer graphics. Not no more!
In 1987 I got cheap Season Tickets to see the Winnipeg Blue Bombers play CFL football at the Winnipeg Stadium. This was the Stadium's chance to fill the North End with students and the like. The guys got royaly soused.
I sat with Terry G., my buddy from the 'Bach.
This happened right in front of us. One week a very muscular guy insisted his girlfriend walk in front of this drunk guy. Her only crime was wearing a pair of bright pink shorts (actually, the real crime was going out with this muscular joker). The drunk guy mumbled something about the shorts — and then it was on! The muscular guy wanted to start a fight but somebody held him back. The air was filled with catcalls, jeers and popcorn, and we were utterly showered with beer. The muscular guy was hauled away, and we got back to what remained of the football game.
At a game some weeks later the muscular guy showed up sans girlfriend. My friend moved down to chat with him. They talked a bit and Terry came back to report. Turns out this guy was also from the 'Bach, but I remembered a scrawny kid from Paraguay. These days he was an electrician with papers, and muscular.
I returned to the University of Winnipeg. "Could this be?" I asked my prof buddy, also a former resident of the 'Bach.
"Oh yes," said he. "The Paraguayan Mennonites left because they thought the Canadian government was meddling with their curriculum. When many of them returned to the 'Bach some years later they were met with general contempt."
"General contempt" — I'll say! In the '70s in that particular geography there was no greater curse then being called "Paraguayan." If one of them became a little scrappy — and very muscular — I could hardly blame him.
I sure disliked being covered with beer though.
My wife reminds me that two years ago I suffered a hemorrhagic stroke in the Pons.
Initially doctors said I wouldn't live. Then they said I wouldn't talk. What I do ain't purty, but just try shutting me up!
I owe my wife an enormous debt of gratitude. Straight fellas my age often say that about their wives, but I would not just be poorer, I would be dead without her.
Nat "King" Cole was probably singing about the cherry blossoms in NYC but never mind.
The Concert Band and Concert Choir took a couple of tour buses from our Mennonite High School in downtown Winnipeg to Thompson up north. Thompson High was quite chichi and had a dance that night and we were all invited. The Mennonite teachers warned me away from attending, however. Apparently a large sum of money had gone missing from a student's locker and plans were afoot to beat up me specifically.
Instead I went to the town movie palace, where there was a double-billing: The Elephant Man and Airplane!
The place, quite large, was packed. The crowd had clearly come for the latter. Wow, did the air smell like booze! Hoots and hollering commenced. People threw popcorn at the screen and it landed on others. ZAZ could not have created better conditions for their crazy movie.
As for me, I had a comic book. Spider-man was fighting some guy who had boomerangs that cut a staircase in half (it was tricky). I expected to read, dammit!
And to think some people wanted to give me a thumping!
Another Charlie Watts story: Mick Jagger was pacing his NYC hotel room and singing. "Where's my drummer?"
Charlie Watts knocked on the door. When Mick answered Charlie promptly delivered several smart cuffs to that famous mouth and disappeared.
Lessons: A) Charlie Watts was nobody's "drummer"; B) Mick Jagger was a member of a band; and most importantly C) don't piss-off Charlie Watts.
I have a playlist that includes a number of acts I've seen perform in smaller venues. I also have the new(ish) AC/DC on CD, which I have ripped and added to the playlist. Now granted AC/DC probably threw a gazillion dollars at the entire album and is one of the last bands to do so. But I am talking about their throwaway tracks — album padding. If your very best cannot sound as good as AC/DC's worst, well, that's just a little sad.
Link: I'm with my aunt on this issue.
At the south end of the Canadian Shield on the eastern side of Manitoba (near Kenora, Ontario, in fact) was Red Rock Bible Camp, where I worked as a counsellor one summer. The lake was surrounded by pine trees. A large stone led to a small sandy beach.
The water was quite muddy and the lake was for the most part shallow. Lake weeds were a constant challenge.
Earlier I had been a camper there. The weeds were controlled by chemicals that summer. Campers were told the water would change colour if we peed in it.
“Is this true?” I asked my counsellor.
“Well, have you seen the trunks on [my junior counsellor]?”
“...yeah...”
“They used to be white.”
Anyway, swimmers got ear infections that year, so that was the end of the chemicals.
In the summer of '84 the weeds were dealt with by raking the silt at the bottom of the lake with a string of barbed-wire in a circular fashion using an outboard motorboat and nailing one end of the barbed-wire to the dock. The maintenance fellow in the motorboat was followed silently by a guy in a rowboat. In my memory my buddy stands tall in the rowboat, with his shock of red hair. He is using the garden rake to scoop up freshly shorn weeds from the lakewater and heaping them inside the drifting rowboat.
There was one week when I insisted we build a nose during the sandcastle competition. The nose was left alone until some Wisenenheimer stuffed the nostrils with green seaweed.
“Everyone’s a critic,” I muttered.
I remember listening to ZZ Top on the radio of the family car that summer, lots of feedback on a single guitar string (it can't really be heard here but the studio-album recording of the same song definitely brings it to the fore):
Oh, hey — it's Sunday! Preach a sermon on 1 John 1:9. Go!
It’s a question I ask myself, believe it or not. I’ve been at this for nearly 20 years. As my kid said when I began taking guitar lessons and was in the “Michael Rowed The Boat Ashore” phase, “You think he’d know how to play that thing by now.” (BTW don't do what I did — start here instead.)
I’m still learning, baby! Corrective and other comments welcomed below.
This was the first I'd heard of Charlie Watts. Anyone else I should know of?
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RUSH was at SARStock getting ready to do their thing, when a little, old man burst into the Green Room demanding to see Neil Peart. Neil had his own room and was busy being Neil. He yanked the electronic click-track out of his ears long enough to hear the old man say, "I will watch you! I will watch you!" RUSH got to the stage and started playing "Tom Sawyer." Sure enough, standing in the wings was little, old Charlie Watts, listening to them, but mostly listening to — and watching — Neil Peart.
“You’ve never been?” said Terry. “Check lt out!”
The Winnipeg Jets had a souvenir shop in a small closet with an upper and lower door. Every inch was shellacked with triumphant Jets pictures from newspapers and magazines. The upper door swung out to reveal a large, round tin of Player’s smoking tobacco, and buttons.
At the time Winnipeg had a “triple threat” with Ulf Nillson, Anders Hedberg and Bobby Hull. I ordered buttons of all three but figured Bobby looked like Bobby, and Anders Hedberg looked just plain weird. To my eyes Ulf Nilsson actually looked heroic, so his was the button I wore. Since it was still the 1970s these buttons were quite large.
Later the closet was completely closed. I don’t know why I went back — it must have been en route to the troughs in the Men’s Room.
This is the CBC story of Scott Templeton's LEGO recreation of the old Winnipeg Arena. Urine troughs and the Winnipeg Jets souvenir closet are (I'm guessing) not included.
“Hey kid — c’mere and smoke a little Weed.”
Sorry. But my mother taught me to never ingest unknown smoking materials from a couple of long-hairs leaning in the middle of a concrete ramp of the Winnipeg Stadium.
In my early 20s I was counseled by an older fellow. He woke up from an operation and his sight was incredibly blurry. Within a couple of days he had lost all vision.
In 1802 Beethoven, then 29, wrote a suicide note to his brothers after he'd lost his hearing. This was never sent.
At 56 I had a hemorrhagic stroke that put me in a wheelchair and left me unable to use the bathroom without help (hooray!). The doctors all say I am lucky just to be alive, never mind talking ugly. How has it been for the survivors, my dearest friends and especially my wife? I can't begin to imagine. Prior to this I was probably a Simpsons meme (by now isn't that everybody's fate?).
"Breakdown can often lead to breakthrough." Hey, the truth is we're all in crisis, and that's no joke.
These thoughts occurred to me this morning as I listened to Mary Hynes interview Andrew Jamieson for Tapestry.
I watched Blade Runner and heard Harrison Ford's monotonous monologue during an afternoon matinee in the Colony theatre across the street from the Hudson’s Bay store in downtown Winnipeg, MB. Dan was there, wearing cowboy boots. He was going to be a prison guard, and I had recently done good deeds at the Headingley Jail. We yacked about this and sat together in the middle of the cinema. He had read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? At that point the closest I’d been to a PKD novel was in a Coles bookstore in Unicity Mall. That was okay — Dan said he would tell me all about it during the movie.
Turns out that besides the Voight-Kampff Test there was precious little to say. The director veered sharply from the novel, as was the norm.
One guy behind us tittered as Priss pounded the floor and died. I later told my mother about this. She shook her head and said, “Some guys just don’t know how to respond.”
Links: In two parts I review Denis Villeneuve's movie sequel Blade Runner 2049; this is my commentary on PKD's extraordinary empathy; I still think A Scanner Darkly is the best PKD on film; this is my commentary commentary for A Scanner Darkly and Crumb; in 2015 Leonard Nimoy died — this is my commentary on the difference between him and Harrison Ford; and this is the Wiki for Blade Runner 1982.
kotke.org turned 25 yesterday. Hey, this blog is almost that old! Nineteen and counting — but I recommend you not. Count the years of my blogging, that is. Visit kotke.org instead.
I have often said that blogspot and Amazon kept me sane. Throw in the development of YouTube Music and the perfect trifecta was formed for my hemorrhagic stroke.
In hindsight I’d tell the younger Whisky Prajer to get into the habit of physically publishing something every year. The younger version of me would have been sleep-deprived and insufferable, but when was I neither of those things?
On their death Mennonites typically publish a reminiscence of how sternly they were raised, called a Festschrift. This gets promptly ignored — it’s much too little too late — and the show goes on.
Consider this blog my Festschrift — the kids already ignore it. Other people write more entertainingly — to find out what growing up the Bach was like a reader can't do much better than the novels of Andrew Unger or Miriam Toews.
It appears the hem-length reached the floor this year. As for the fellas, a guy had to be super-fit and a little bit bulimic to fit into the monkey-suit — even "stay fat, people" Seth Rogan. The Academy Award fashions are here. Beware: the day of David Niven and The Streaker is upon us.
David Lindley died March 3, 2023.
Links: this is David Lindley LA Times Obit. This is Lindley's wiki. This is the guy who told me about Lindley's death, the same guy who introduced me to the music of David Lindley. Win This Record! by David Lindley & El Rayo-X was one of the most-played CDs in the house (Amazon). This is the concert meme. I tag you but be aware — the bots are watching! Do not use "concert" or any variant as a password.
The young women in my room were all salaried but to a person talked about returning to College or University and getting another degree.
“I want to work at Walmart,” I said.
The whole room erupted with laughter.
But here’s the sad truth: I would LOVE to work in a big box store. At Walmart I bought Acer laptops for the kids and swapped 'em all out to be Linux Ubuntu machines. The uninfected Acers outlasted the Apple products that came later. I even used them myself.
Walmart was one of the last places to sell music CDs and DVDs of all stripes. I’d buy them both and rip 'em. Now that I think of it Walmart was where we purchased the Nintendo Wii, the last gaming console to have been a “big deal” for us.
But you won’t find me there or in a university classroom. For now I am here, and this is where I belong.
My friend Terry and I were in a carpeted church basement, DJing Christian Rock during a car rally. The youth pastor bussed in the sound system, and while the basement was empty (except for the women in the kitchen) Terry picked up the mic and clowned around. The youth pastor introduced us to the senior pastor who stopped in his tracks long enough to glance at us like the couple of ass-wipes that we were. Well — I was at any rate. I shouldn’t speak on behalf of Terry.
Some years later I was taking a break from the young woman who later became my endures-all-things wife. I was studying Canadian Literature at the University of Winnipeg that summer and meeting Terry at the library of the Manitoba Legislature. I smoked DuMaurier cigarettes, wore a crimson beater and probably looked like this, but Terry, who was working for the Manitoba New Democratic Party, saw fit to see me anyway:
The EMB Church in the Bach had a youth choir called “His Light” which took a couple of buses to perform in the United States south of the border.
First stop was Bemidji, MN.
I vaguely recall a concrete Paul Bunyan standing beside Babe, the big blue ox. And there was a log-cabin souvenir shop! I bought a Star Trek magazine there, which I read many times and blog about here.
This must have been in the mid-’70s because Star Wars ('77) changed everything. I was fixated on cowboy boots (across the border even kids seemed to have 'em) so I hadn’t yet got my own (on sale locally for $12 at Casper’s Pick ‘n’ Pay Shoes).
We spent our last night in the Holiday Inn at Fargo ND. I don’t remember the swimming pool but there must have been one involved. Instead my friend Duke and I stayed put in our hotel room and watched Cable TV, which was not yet available in the 'Bach. We grew up on on four channels, one of them French. We saw Star Trek (“The Devil In The Dark” — in living color!) and The Twilight Zone (“A Stop At Willoughby” — in glorious black and white!). In between we caught flashes of Mr. Majestyk. “Ooo, Chuck Bronson,” said our roommate from the doorway, pausing briefly in his nighttime journeys. “Don’t mess with Chuck!” For the next five years I’d leap into the back of a pickup, kick open the tailgate and blow away the bad guys with a shotgun. Reading the Elmore Leonard novel some years later was actually a disappointment.
I later asked our youth pastor if we’d stop at Fargo or some other Holiday Inn. He snorted. “We’re never doing that again.”
Oh well. Once was enough.
I remember Denver better than I do Philadelphia. Wow, was it hot! There was a drought on – restaurants now charged for a glass of water. That was the first time I’d heard Cicada-song.
Our family lived in the student apartment at the University of Denver. We saw others do it so we wrapped our windows in foil.
We were just south of the ILIF library which had central air conditioning. The basement, where they shelved The Lord Of The Rings, was incredibly cold and had fluorescent lighting. But ILIF had a Pop Culture section with comfy chairs by the entrance. I remember a large comic with Tarzan in it and the Logan’s Run novel. I could borrow these by showing the key fob to the librarian, but I would typically shut the place down and walk back in darkness to our stifling apartment.
That key fob also got us swimming lessons. I walked with my little brother to the indoor pool. When it wasn’t lessons it was Public Swim. This one time during Public Swim a young woman in a two-piece bikini held court with a couple of fellows. Needless to say she had a phenomenal rack.
No babysitter for us kids, just our long-suffering mother. She once packed bunches of pancakes in WonderBread bags for the elephants in the public zoo. I was so embarrassed — this wasn’t popcorn like other kids had! But I fed the elephants pancakes and we put the newly empty plastic bags in the public trash can.
Denver was where I saw Star Wars for the first time. Our father took us kids to the cinema at the Cinderella City mall to see The Rescuers. Oh, he also took the bus every morning to toil on his D. Min. at the Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary. Postgraduate work — I thought that was just something parents did.
I have plenty of other Denver memories — today Casa Bonita is a South Park punchline but back then it was a very big deal (although the food was always yucky). And that’s just the beginning.
Blame Robert Pirsig!
Links: This is a tape recording of Star Wars in 1977; This is the Instagram page for the Cinderella City Project (sh — don’t tell anybody but apparently Cinderella City got quite seedy); this is the Boing-Boing page (with pictures!) of Casa Bonita; and this is my tribute to Star Wars '77.
I used to cheer for the Philadelphia Flyers when they were the Broad Street Bullies. A CBC Radio morning man talked about interviewing a hockey player who told him, “We used to hate visiting the Philadelphia Arena. You’d step out on the ice and the crowd would roar. There’s nothing like that sound.”
My Grade 9 teacher in Winnipeg spoke glowingly of a Flinflon compatriot who had enough and was drowning a kid in the school toilet until another teacher stopped him. “And the name of that kid,” said my teacher, “was Bobby Clarke.”
Still, when I was little I identified as “from Philadelphia.” That’s because I had spent my first few years there as my father toiled on his MA at Westminster Seminary.
I really don’t remember those years very well. I vaguely recall a white wooden garage. Me and a couple of guys tried in vain to budge a weight set.
And I remember a pool with a lion’s head near the top.
And that’s all, really. I was just a tot in cloth diapers.
Links: this is the official video to Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia.” This is Low Cut Connie performing the same song.
I was “center-texting” after the picture in the previous post and I didn’t know how I got there, so I did a test post and hit the “compose” button (upper-left corner in blogspot) and changed it to HTML. Then I checked the test post and did the same.
One quick tweak to the HTML and the center-texting issue was solved. Let the website do all the work, I say.
I was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (because what else was I gonna read?) during our motorcycle trip to Expo '86 in Vancouver and down to Los Angeles, California.
The author keeps narrowing down paper subject matter for a student until this person is stuck with a single brick in a building. This person begins writing and has an “a-ha!” experience.
Our family was visiting friends in Southern California during the Christmas of Break of 1981/82 I persuaded our host and father to drive me in the family car to Calvary Chapel in Anaheim. I had consulted the back pages of CCM Magazine and was going to see Daniel Amos in concert.
These days the church stage is quite common, but back then it was rare — we usually trooped off to the church basement for “coffee houses” and the truly rowdy material. Here the crowd was warmed up by a large guy with dark hair and a Bible. “You know the movie posters say ‘Apocalypse: Now.’ I say, ‘Apocalypse: Soon.’”
Then Daniel Amos front man and song writer Terry Scott Taylor took the stage and sang, “Big Deal.” He was wearing a black leather Elvis suit and playing what I later recognized was a Gibson SG. The stage was bright and well-lit. Mennonites had more ambience, really.
When the band finally did an encore they reached a second time for “I Love You #19” “You liked it so much we’ll do it again!”
TST spoke of a quadriplegic who had acquired this condition because the driver of her vehicle was swatting at a bee while navigating the highway. They rolled over. “I asked how she was doing. ‘She’s serving Jesus.’” In hindsight TST was rubbing the fur the wrong way with the “believe it and you’ll see it” crowd.
I got picked up at the end of the concert. “I simply HAD to pee in a washroom marked ‘Brothers,’” said our father.
We flew back to Winnipeg and I promptly bought a used bass. No chords, no arpeggios and certainly no amplifier. It would have been roughly this vintage:
Links: here is my obituary for DA bassist Tim Chandler; Strange Advance came out with “Worlds Away”at the end of 1982 which I listened to and sang along with in the family car, an experience I blog about here. And Pearl Jam performs “Alive” here. The Daniel Amos time line is here.
Spoiler alert. I don't like Alias but since I do like the acting of Lena Olin I skipped straight to the last episode of season 4.
Sydney (Garner) and her father (Garber) are now in charge of SD-6. They are chasing after Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin). Also Sydney is kinda-sorta engaged to her CIA handler Michael Vaughn (Michael Varta). And that is all I will say about that, except that you do not want to be engaged to Sydney Bristow.
And wow did I not care. And maybe JJ Abrams ruined the Star Wars movies. I sure enjoyed them at the time, even the last movie (although it will never make this list). But I actually wanted to keep watching Lost because I cared about the characters — all of 'em. Not so Alias.
