Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

Paging Mister By-Tor; Your Snow Dog is Waiting

To Save a Mockingbird

He's rethinking this evolution thing, this outlier strategy. He's saying: Why can I fly south for the winter like the other mockingbirds? Thank heaven for this cherry tree.

Ain't you paid up yet?

Because after his long vacation/dwelling in the desert/fundraising nightmare, it took Michael Jantze a while to get back in the groooooooove. But I'm feeling it. If you were a paid subscriber, you'd be feeling it too. Paypal on the virtual barrelhead, baby.

Unh! Unh! Good God!

I read a profile of James Brown in the New Yorker a few years ago that just made me heartsick. The profile, which felt very well-researched and true, portrayed a man who was pretty completely lost in a world that had not so much changed as radically upended itself. This despite the pure brilliance of his early career, his novel sudden juddering soul completely disconnected from and applying hard gravity to everything going on at the same time.

I invoked the Fresh Air interview of Brown today, then, a little nervously. I wanted so badly to hear a Brown I could like and gape at. I think the world of his music, Rocky soundtracks notwithstanding. But Terry Gross, who is eternally cooler than cool, was so audibly joyful to have Brown on her show that I got caught up with her. She was unusually, sweetly vulnerable, a little stumbly in her questions, willing to let Brown sometimes fail to answer them (utterly -- as if he were answering questions in his head). And so I got to not criticize him in my head either, and his goofy answers became endearing, his wife's gushing worship a cause to cock an eyebrow but not to sneer, even in light of today's news. Ain't nothing simple, as my mother says.

All of that was nice. I had Brown in my headphones when I walked through Paris one rainy morning; I've played him for Joe and talked about rhythm; who doesn't squeal "PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!" into a hairbrush from time to time?

Lacking Those Survivors' "LL" Initials

It's time to face up to it. Chloe Sullivan no longer can be excepted to survive the Smallville Run. She knows the secret; there is no Chloe in the adult Superman mythos. Stick a kryptonite fork in her, because she is SO done.

Where does he get this?

Dad: Eat your carrots.

Joe: [turns to look into living room] What carrots? What carrots do you mean? There are carrots moving out the door. There are carrots dancing on the window. What more could you ask for? A whole town of carrots?