the Common Place

By special request - a post today for Chris of the underverse. He’ll understand the oblique reference , I think. Video by legendary Soviet/perestroika band Aquarium. English translation courtesy of Anti-War Songs

Thus queried my life partner, the Bicycle Repairman, this morning as I was unglueing my eyelids over my first cuppa.

I guessed Douglas Adams*, wrongly. Actually it was Stephen Fry (Jeeves & Wooster, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, The Ode Less Travelled, &c &c.)

Mr. Stephen Fry continues to obsess about technology and all things non-Microsoft, as well as write brilliantly and expansively about language, literature, the universe, and everything at The New Adventures of Mr. Stephen Fry.

And later today, I’m going to see his old buddy, Emma Thompson, in “Last Chance Harvey.” You see, everything really is connected.

Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Paul Shearer ,Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson

* This is the answer to the question “Who bought the first Macintosh computer in the UK?”

Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

-David Foster Wallace, (9/29/08 New Yorker)

GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS: A Talk by Clay Shirky

Gin Lane and Beer Alley, 1750

Frank Gehry vs. Jane Jacobs: Atlantic Yards Project in Brooklyn

Jane Jacobs Cocktail:

Prosecco, elderflower liqueur, orange bitters, Hendrick’s gin

Jane Jacobs 101

Jane Jacobs on Library Thing

8mm film clips from the ’30’s and 40’s of the horses on my grandfather’s farmstead in southern Minnesota. Grandpa was not a touchy-feely kind of guy so that last kiss on the nose says a lot.

Ludo pastes his visions of nature mutating in self-defense on the walls and doorways of Paris:

via PSFK

Here’s what I encountered  walking home last night. Literally a swarm of cop cars , 7 or 8 cops standing in the front yard of a home, and a crowd of college-age kids. A drug bust, or a really heavy response to a noisy party? I asked a cop, and he said the raid was “part of an ongoing investigation of activities at this residence.” From someone I knew in the crowd, I got the info that the police had followed some of the people home from a protest, and were refused admittance to the house. The police then blockaded the house, while waiting for a search warrant to be prepared.

From this report, it appears that the earlier incident was neither peaceful nor legal but, of course, this is the SC Senile we’re talking about, so who knows what actually happened. For one thing, the reporter seems very willing to take the police spokesperson’s word that the crowd last night was “agitated” and were “taunting” officers. The one thing that struck me in fact was that it seemed so oddly quiet for such a dramatic scene. And since when is asking for a badge number a “taunt?”

The actual raid occurred about 45 minutes after I left. At that point, the landlord had arrived, and provided the police with a key. But they still broke in with a battering ram. Why? Lots of reasons, but mainly I think because battering rams must justify their own existence by being used.

Right now I feel very weird about what’s going on around the corner from my house. I have a lot of unanswered questions.

Photos from indybay.org (As usual, the photos are the most interesting thing about the post on indymedia. The verbiage is long on attitude, short on information. Also, a comment from a neighbor there makes it seem like the atmosphere changed after I left.)

Artem Troitsky, shown here bumming a cigarette off Kino guitarist Yuri Kasparian while lead singer Viktor Tsoi looks on, wrote the book on the 80’s underground rock scene in the USSR. He also seems, from what I’ve read, to be one of the few really independent journalists left in Russia. In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, he recounts how Back in the USSR came to be written, and shares his views on the Russian music scene, then and now:

“But if we’re speaking about the songs, I was more interested in the lyrics, rather than the music. I really think that poetically Russian rock is at least not worse than American, although it’s absolutely different, of course.

“So when this paradigm of the 1970s/80s Soviet rock that was dear to me disappeared, evaporated, inevitably I lost my interest in it. But speaking about the music itself, I always say that we have some quite likable guys, whose work I treat with sympathy and understanding.”

One of the most “likable guys” of that era has to be Viktor Tsoi, who I personally think can hold his own as a songwriter on any territory, though of course given the challenges of the times a lot of the recordings are pretty rough. It seems, thanks to the Knackered Hack, that I am now part of a not-secret plot to bring the cult of Tsoi to the West.

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(Still dealing with post-flu lassitude, not up to much intellectual effort, but here’s a roundup of some Jonathan Richman artifacts for the common place book.)

Though my husband, the Bicycle Repairman, accuses Richman of being “Raffi for adults, ” he definitely has a place in the secret history of the 20th century. He’s been called a proto-punk for his his first album with the original Modern Lovers: The classic “Roadrunner” from that album is supposedly the first punk song, and it’s been covered by everyone, including the Sex Pistols. Though what Sid and Johnny were doing singing  about driving by the Stop’n’ Shop on a suburban highway late at night with the AM radio on, I’ll never know.

Here’s an extended tribute to Roadrunner  by Laura Barton in the UK Guardian: The car, the radio, the night - and rock’s most thrilling song.

I especially wanted to preserve this item in my commonplace book: Jonathan’s letter to Creem magazine in December 1973.

(letter via rockcritics.com )

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There’s a story called Chest in Will Self’s collection Grey Area which is set in a sort of Chekhovian alternate London where everyone is on the verge of respiratory crisis. The pavements are covered with “Jackson Pollock murals of sputum,” people carry oxygen cylinders, pass around inhalers, and sip cough syrup from liqueur glasses instead of after dinner drinks.

I feel like this has been my reality for the past week. Though we don’t spit on the floor (much) and are likely to swig the cough syrup straight from the bottle if we can’t find the stupid plastic cup and the spoons are all dirty.

Of course, the the always-original Wonder Girl found the respiratory motif too constricting, and proceeded to throw up several times on Sunday. We were all grateful for this new distraction.

During all this the weather has been bright, sunny, in the sixties, with the sound of heavy surf drowning out the sea lions every morning.

So far we haven’t needed oxygen, or — a more likely scenario– prednisone, though the doctor did bring up the “p” word. The take-home from all this is, even if you get real cocky about cutting down on the need for asthma meds on an everyday basis, it’s a good idea to stock up on a rescue inhaler when you know a big fat hairy virus is headed your way. And to do this at a time that’s convenient for everyone involved.