American Fez

The Revenger's Tango

I am unmoved - literally - by the music of James Brown, the so-called "Godfather of Soul" in the apparently mafioso world of discotheques and social events for swingers of advanced age. Imagine, if you will, a disorientated jug band wandering across an army parade ground while a twitchy drill sergeant harangues some particularly inept column of new recruits. This is what James Brown's oeuvre sounds like to me. Similarly, I am not seduced by Salsa or Samba rhythems. Here, three drill sergeants find themselves lost in a Mardi gras maze, frequired to shout in unison to make their demands heard above the incessant din. Frankly, I'd prefer to squat by beside a road renovation and listen to the sweet song of the jackhammer.

So, you maybe wondering - if you are extremely bored - exactly what kind of music will entice me on to the dance floor. Well, to be perfectly honest, I'll dance to anything as long as I'm dancing on the grave of the chef responsible for the chinese take-out I foolishly consumed last night. But alas, I am forced to remain seated for the immediate future.

Mechanical Piano

Next Thursday, my computer and I will be staging our annual Festival of Automatic Music. The program will include data steams of works by the likes of Franz Schubot, Ludwig van Bytehoven and Gabriel Faure-wire, and will terminate with an adaigo from our sponsor: the Packard Bell Canon.

Tickets for this unique event are for sale on a "first-come-first-served" basis, so I'm sure all of them will still remain unsold long after the last echo of the last note has drifted off into the evening airwaves. Forget to buy yours today!

Comrades

 

Hidden inside the darkest, most urine-stained recesses of the bus shelter, I found a timetable; an optimistic fantasia of experimental numerology and obscure street intersections that required a magnifying glass to read. Apparently, the next inbound bus was arriving at 07:22; but that might be the crosstown express, or the Sunday only. There was no way of knowing, since the section of timetable that once revealed this information had been erased in favor of a graffito proclaiming the superiority of someone called Derrique.

And so my fellow commuters and I stared fixedly down the road, facing east like a tribe of ancient sun-worshippers waiting anxiously for our God to appear. In such circumstances, it was easy to imagine Derrique as an angry apostate; a former acolyte who had desecrated the temple in a fit of heretical rage after losing his faith. It was now 7:34. Perhaps we should all follow Derrique out of the public transport wilderness?

Finally, at 7:43, a bus rounded the corner and began wheezing its way towards us, stopping and starting at regular intervals, as if the driver were only just learning the principals of acceleration. When it reached us, many interminable minutes later, I glanced nervously down the length of the vehicle. It was crammed full of squashed, gloomy passengers whose desolate expressions brought to mind miserable prisoners languishing in some godforsaken mobile gulag.

It was either squeeze aboard this Stalinist charabanc, turn around and trudge the Long March of Chairman Mao, or try to flag down one of Enver Hoxha's rusting mincabs. They tell me Albania is very beautiful this time of year, if you can afford a private tour.

Peace In Our Time

As a committed pacifist, I oppose all of those grim "reenactment groups" that stage the battles of yesteryear in period costume and with authentic weaponry. It is neither entertaining nor educational to glorify war and conflict in this manner, especially when such ersatz musketeers and dragoons might more profitably employ their weekends mowing neglected lawns, and particularly when they live next-door to me.
Consequently, I am forming my own "Treaty of Versailles" reenactment group. With the addition of a few large mirrors here and there, our reenactments can be performed in the comfort of our own homes. And furthermore, since reenactment of the treaty merely requires a brief signature on a piece of paper, the entire production can be completed in under five minutes, leaving members plenty of free weekend time to mow that lawn and get a start on many other household chores besides.

Fahrenheit, Ages 9-11

This weekend, most probably on Sunday afternoon, sometime after my mid-month nose wiping, I will be burning copies of Sister Penelope's Book for Girls, a blasphemous and damnable compendium of sugar and spice and all things nice. Readers of this wretched book - if you can actually call them "readers," since it mostly contains pictures of puppies and butterflies - plan to erect a dolls house in the northeastern corner of our nursery, a sacred alcove where branch-line track from my train set once ran before nanny banned such operations after a heavy freight engine collided with her foot. Who knows where the girl germs will end if these Strawberry Shortcake wannabes are allowed to erect their floral wallpapered monstrosity? It is an insult to the time-honored, little boy traditions of leaving greasy fingerprints on the furniture and making sparks by over-cranking a clockwork motor.

The Mystery of the Tedious Television Personality

I am very skeptical about Skepticism. Professional skeptics, also known as "experts," are far too pleased with themselves to be believable. Usually appearing on Public Television in preposterously over-sized and bizarrely patterned knitwear, they grin smugly into the camera while mocking amateur footage of paranormal activity, apparently unaware that the comb-over hairstyle they invariably sport is even more worthy of debunking than clairvoyance and crop circles combined. Skeptics buttress their interminable diatribes against the imagination with reams upon reams of scientific data, despite the indisputable fact that scientific data is about as reliable as a UFO flight pattern. Ultimately, of course, we can say without a scintilla doubt that Skeptics are just downright boring. And any opinion held by people that boring must plainly be wrong, no matter how sane and rational it may seem to be after years of rigorous examination.

Acoustic Disturbance

The history of music, of course, begins with the half heard echo of ghostly fingers drumming on the dried skins of extinct creatures. Nobody can know what the first concert sounded like. It is possible that the technique of emulating flatulence with a cupped hand and armpit was employed. In other words, not completely dissimilar to the latest Lady Gaga song.
Elvis Presley was once proclaimed "the king of rock and roll," a troubled and protean musical fiefdom, somewhat like the Balkans in that respect. Bob Dylan has been called "the voice of his generation," so perhaps he should be celebrated for his ventriloquism rather than his harmonica playing.
Meanwhile, my own recent recording, Chronicles of the Cacophanous Kazoo, will soon be available for download (corrupt file format only). It was reviewed by Lute Enthusiast Monthly with this glowing recommendation: "We burned the CD. There was really no alternative."