Ladies of Spain, hm hm hm hm…
My dad plays Lady of Spain on the banjo. It’s my favorite. I told my mother that, and she said, “Yes, that is pretty funny.”
And I’m, like, “funny? What do you mean?”
And she said, “Honey, it’s a joke. Lady of Spain? On the banjo?”
And I go, “I don’t get it.”
And she’s like, “well…it’s not a song you associate with the banjo, is all.”
And I say, “I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”
I get it now. I guess. Anyhow, this lady of Spain is a large cast metal bust of a lady. From Spain. My grandfather picked it up somewhere and she’s been smirking in my livingroom ever since. When I was a child, her jewelry was touched with different colors of shiny enamel. My grandfather again. He had outbursts of taste and spasms of tacky. A real Renaissance man.
We call her Chastity. I didn’t get that joke for years, either. See, she’s destined to remain chaste. Because…no snootch. Her map doesn’t have the Netherlands on it, know’m saying?
Later, Mother had her bronzed. Turns out, the original casting material was…zinc or something.
Mother didn’t like Chastity. It’s that prim smile. Looks a touch judgmental for her comfort. Mother was no better than she should have been, as the saying goes. She couldn’t afford to have a lot of judgment aimed in her direction.
Chastity gets decorated at Christmas time. The rest of the year, she’s mostly a hat rack. Yep, I’m still Spring cleaning. I have a feeling y’all will get to meet a lot of my stuff.
July 2, 2007 — 3:52 pm
Comments: 119
Sousapalooza
I called my dad on Father’s Day and he said, “I finally broke down and did it.” Now, when a member of my family says something along these lines, the ingrained response is, “would you like to tell me about it, or shall I just turn on CNN?”
He says, “I bought a bass horn.”
“A…what?” This was unexpected.
“It’s like a tuba, but smaller.”
Huh. My father was all-state cornet champion in 1941, until he tragically blew out an eardrum hitting a high note. He was master, so he says, of a technique called “triple tonguing.”
No. Forget I said that. Certain concepts should not be paired in sentences: “father” and “tonguing” as an example.
Anyhow, he well and truly blew out an eardrum. He’d had ear infections all his life, which they treated in those pre-antibiotic days by poking little drainage holes in same. Horrible procedure, but if they didn’t, the infection could break through in the other direction, brainwards, and then you were fucked. It happened to a friend of his and he died.
Another friend of his died of rabies. He died, and they went into his room, and he had the encyclopedia open to the “rabies” page. Wooo. That’s completely off topic, but I always thought it was cool.
Twenty five years later, they made my dad a new eardrum out of a piece of vein from his arm, scraped thin. I remember visiting him in the hospital. His head was wrapped up in these huge bandages. He looked like Roger Ramjet. It didn’t turn out all that well.
Long story short, the old bugger is very deaf. He practices what you might call Xtreme music. Bagpipes. Banjos. In the bathroom. He likes the acoustics, which he defines as “hey, I can hear this!”
I’ve been thinking of my stepmother, stuck waiting on a deaf, drunken old cripple with a tuba. And I canNOT stop smiling.
June 18, 2007 — 7:51 am
Comments: 18
B-b-birthday b-b-b-banjo
Happy Weaselfest! I nominated today, first sunny day of the trip, as my pretend birthday.
In the morning we walked through town and picked up some shopping (Heidsieck Monopole Blue Top on sale! How’s that for coinkydink?) and visited Mr Whippy. Because I’ve been very, very naughty. And it’s my pretend birthday.
Then we drove out to the country and had a walk along a public footpath. The whole island is criss-crossed with these footpaths. They’re ancient, traditional rights of way for foot (and sometimes horse or vehicle) traffic. The libertarian in me is horrified that landowners have to put up with — and maintain! — a network of paths across private property to accomodate a steady stream of trespassers. The bunny hugger in me considers them a national treasure. Even if I did put my hand in a stinging nettle.
If ever you visit this country, make sure you somehow wangle a drive away from town. The Brits have done a remarkable job not crapping up their countryside. It’s a lush green sheep-encrusted rolling treefest, especially in May, punctuated with 11th Century pubs and shepherd’s huts and thatched cottages and ruined castles. I’m pretty sure they got the Disney guys in for the preliminary design.
Then it was back home for the traditional Showering of Gifts. I got such a lot of excellent loot this year; the surprise hit was this sporty little traveling banjo. Now everywhere I go, I can carry with me the beautiful, evocative sound of tomcats flossing their anuses with razor wire. Why anybody would voluntarily hand me this loaded weapon, I do not know. Mr Whippy could probably tell you.
Then it was out to my favorite restaurant and home to a nice brew and…I’m pretty sure I’ll fall down the something and break my something later. This is just way too good.
May 18, 2007 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 16
It burns, burns, burns
“So many prominent things and prominent people in American history took place in that house — everyone from Billy Graham to Bob Dylan went into that house,” said singer Marty Stuart, who lives next door and was married to Cash’s daughter, Cindy, in the 1980s.
And me! Weasel! I’ve been in that house!
Johnny Cash’s house. Burned to the ground yesterday in Hendersonville, Tennessee. It was a big wooden wagon wheel of a place on Caudill Drive, sticking out of a cliff face overlooking Old Hickory Lake.
Braxton Dixon, locally famous architect, built it for himself, and Cash managed to wheedle it away from him. I remember my mother saying he had to mow his roof. Looking at the pictures (the BEFORE pictures), that doesn’t look right. Maybe it was a joke. Or maybe they changed the roofline at some point. Anyhow, the funky design surely made fighting the fire all but impossible.
It was no big. We weren’t best buds or anything. My family lived in the same general area for a few years and were part of the same general cocktail party circuit.
I was an eight year old knucklehead and I don’t recall a whole lot about it. The thing I remember most vividly about the house itself was the bathroom: it had a small reproduction of Rodin’s The Thinker in it. That was a sophisticated and amusing note, and therefore June Carter must’ve done it, because Johnny was a sweet man but dumb as a stump.
I will forever think of this piece as The Constipated Guy.
And now you will, too.
April 12, 2007 — 12:32 pm
Comments: 27
Men from small towns are dumb
No, no…that’s the title of a pop song by Vaiko Eplik that’s taking Estonia by storm. In fact, he has a whole album about it.
Seems Estonia is having a bit of a redneck problem. Or, as they have it, a rullnokk problem (it doesn’t literally mean redneck, it’s a reference to the baseball caps they wear). They also pimp out their BMW’s, eat hamburgers, drink vodka, use vile language and cruise around looking for “hairies” to beat up.
Vaiko had a little trouble with them after his performance in the Eurovision competition. “I had a few incidents with rullnokks after Eurovision. I got punched a couple of times by these types of people after I didn’t do so well in the competition,” Eplik says.
“This subculture was born when I was in school. When I was 14 I almost became one of them. I thought it was pretty cool to go around drinking gin out of a plastic bottle, wearing these kinds of clothes. But thankfully my dad told me to get my ass back into line and go to singing lessons.”
Singing lessons. Hm. Yes. Watson, I may have deduced the reason rednecks beat this young man to a howling pulp.
You can hear Vaiko’s music (not sung by him) here. I haven’t made up my mind whether its funny bad or just bad. I know badness is part of the experience.
Which brings us to a short film about the rullnokk that’s become a viral hit. It’s called Tulnukas (Alien). It’s about an Estonian dude who gets smacked on the head with a shovel and wakes up with amnesia. His homeys try to re-explain The Life to him.
This one is almost funny enough to connect outside Estonia. I don’t know if you’ll think it’s worth twenty minutes of your life, but you can watch it in three parts (with English subtitles) here, here, and here. Extremely not safe for work, if your boss is Estonian. At the very least, if you listen closely, you can learn some wicked vile language in a foreign tongue. Which — who knows? — might come in handy some day.
Did “Tulnukas” hit its target? Would a rullnokk change his ways after watching the film? Probably not, muses Merivoo [the filmmaker], because the humor goes over their heads. “They don’t understand that they are watching themselves when they watch my movie. The laugh at the jokes and the things the characters do, but they don’t realize that it is about what’s wrong with them.”
Or maybe they do and they simply don’t care if some camera-waving artard looks down on their entertainments. Dudes! That’s us! Pass me a hamburger and some gin…
April 6, 2007 — 5:19 pm
Comments: 6
The very first smack riff, maybe
Everybody knows guitar heroes and smack habits go together like peanut butter and Elvis, but did you know the very first smack riff may have been for banjo?
Soldier’s Joy is a banjo tune of the Civil War era. I remember it from childhood (Soldier’s Joy, not the Civil War. Jesus). I always thought the tune sad and sweet; like being inside a music box. One (unconfirmed) explanation for the title is that “Soldier’s Joy” is morphine — first used in this war. That would make Soldier’s Joy…yes. Exactly.
Here’s a nice drop-thumb version of the tune Google found for me several years ago. The banjoist is Donald Zepp. I’ve just reGoogled and found that Zepp has a MySpace page with this and a few other tunes.
[audio:soldiersjoy_zepp.mp3]
You can thank Enas Yorl for this. Thank him good and hard.
Bonus: here’s a clip of it the way I remember it. This is from the album The Three Pickers (that would be Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs).
[audio:soldiersjoy.mp3]
Does anybody know how long a clip you can publish and still be covered under “fair use”? I kept this under 30 seconds to be on the safe side, but I’d like to know the real, official answer.
February 27, 2007 — 6:54 pm
Comments: 12
Brass Knuckles
I hate jazz. I mean, jazz of the squeak-blatt-toot variety. I know that makes me Mayor McCheese of Squaresville, but I always felt like jazz was an inside joke and I was definitely not inside. It’s all smack and sunglasses and a smug sense of its own coolness.
But somehow I love ragtime, jazz’s crazy grampa in the attic. Ragtime is a joke, too, but I’m in on it. It’s wild, exhuberant bullshit; it’s showy and silly and just this side of stupid. It’s whorehouse piano — poor old Scott Joplin hisself died of syphilis.
My very favorite ragtime piano tune is by two moderns, William Albright and William Bolcom. Yes, this is self-conscious smarty-pants clever-boots well-nigh-atonal modern crap and I ought to hate it, but I don’t. It’s one of those rare pieces of music I’d give a non-vital body-part to be able to play, and then I’d waste my life playing it all day.
Okay, I know what you’re going to think: “You’ve got to be shitting me, Weasel! This is complete crap. He’s just mashing keys there at the beginning, and then it goes downhill.” Well, yes, but give it a chance. Clinical psychosis is the charm of this piece.
The tune is all over the place, the timing is all over the place, but it holds itself together just well enough to keep you listening. Anxious, but listening. It goes haywire and, right before you click it off in disgust, it turns sweet. Drift along on the sweetness of it, and suddenly it’s in your shower waving a knife around.
It’s like bringing home that new person you’ve been dating for dinner with the folks. You know, that new person with Tourette’s Syndrome. Or listening to a very important speech delivered by George Bush. Or being called upon unexpectedly in a meeting, when you were all hungover and daydreaming. You close your eyes, whisper the please-keep-it-together prayer and hope for the best.
Behold! Brass Knuckles:
[audio:brassknuckles.mp3]
— 9:06 am
Comments: 7