I post a weekly diary of the historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I featured this past week in "Cheers & Jeers". For example .....
I've heard of bad hair days ... but this? ....
SEPARATED at BIRTH - Washington Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton and and former Ohio congressman Jim Traficant.
As Bob Dylan sang, "We live in a political world" .... OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
ART NOTES - a career retrospective of the Ukrainian-born American abstractionist painter Jules Olitski is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas to May 6th.
SCIENCE NOTES - Russian scientists have confirmed they have drilled through more than 2.3 miles of ice to reach Lake Vostok - a 6,200 sq mile body of water that has been isolated from the rest of the world for almost 15 million years, sitting under the thick layer of ice on the Antarctic continent.
CHEERS to our meet-up this past weekend in Portsmouth, New Hampshire - pleasantly warm day for mid-February, numerous attendees from around New England, only sorry that a few people were nursing colds and could not attend. Good food, drinks, jokes and conversation - and the political optimism ....
.... was noticably higher than at our last gathering in October, I dare say.
IN CITING his interview in the current issue of Playboy magazine, Paul Krugman assures us that the accompanying photo - to the interview conducted by Jonathan Tasini - does not show him with 'a staple in his navel'.
MONDAY's CHILD is Pudding the Hero Cat - a shelter kitteh that a Wisconsin woman wasn't intending to adopt ... but just couldn't resist. Good thing: because that very night Pudding intervened when the woman was having a diabetic seizure and when she couldn't wake her son verbally, Pudding went to his room to do so.
Even the NY Times' Gail Collins has weighed in on Pudding the Cat.
CONGRATULATIONS to the pastor and former East German human rights activist Joachim Gauck - who seems poised to win election to the ceremonial (yet influential) post as Germany's next president. Although a Social Democrat, he emerged as the compromise candidate acceptable to conservative prime minister Angela Merkel - herself an East German pastor's daughter. If elected, Gauck will replace Christian Wulff, who resigned last week over corruption charges.
SEPARATED at BIRTH - Israeli actor Shlomo Bar Aba and former UK prime minster (and now UN Middle East envoy) Tony Blair.
A BBC REPORTER took note of security forces in China - who tracked him across town, "spotting the same people at different points and different times" - and also that China's internal security system is expected (for the first time) this year to cost more than its entire armed forces.
ART NOTES - a mid-career retrospective of the Dutch portraitist Rineke Dijkstra is at the San Francisco, California Museum of Modern Art thru May 28th.
A PROFILE of the 80's British pop star Adam Ant mentions his bi-polar disease and legal problems ... but who now runs his own record label, begins a tour complete with a photography exhibit, and later this year releases a new album.
DEBAUCHERY CENTRAL - a Cincinnati entrepreneur is offering couples a chance to join the mile high club with a $425 flight in a single-engine Piper ... and says he's had two weddings and a 50th anniversary couple sign-up, as well.
TUESDAY's CHILD was named Mr. Bates the Cat by veterinarians after his left leg had to be amputated when caught in an illegal trap. If unclaimed, the central Massachusetts kitteh will be up for adoption.
SINCE I ALREADY MENTIONED a Paul Krugman interview in Playboy magazine: turns out they also conducted one with MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell in May of 2011.
HISTORY NOTES - if December 7th, 1941 is "a date that will live in infamy" for the USA: then February 19, 1942 is the equivalent for Australia ... because 70 years ago, Japanese bombers swooped on Darwin (in northern Australia) sinking Allied ships and killing hundreds of people. For years the attack was rarely mentioned, but now the story is finally being told.
ART NOTES - The first museum exhibition to trace the rise of the American sports culture is at the Minneapolis, Minnesota Institute of Arts to May 13th.
ART NOTES #2 - the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch created several versions of his famous work The Scream - and an 1895 version (created using pastels) is the only version still in private hands ... but will be sold at auction by Sotheby's in New York this coming May.
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is Social the Cat - who lived with a homeless California woman, unwilling to go to a shelter as "they make you surrender your pet". Fortunately, she and Social have now found permanent housing ... together.
END of an ERA - today being Oscar Night .... well, last week, I noted the 100th birthday of a famous film studio in Germany that is observing its 100th birthday - but a studio that will close in this, its 99th year is London's famous Twickenham Film Studio - which has played home to films like Ridley Scott’s "Blade Runner", Roman Polanski’s "Repulsion", and this year’s Oscar-nominated "The Iron Lady" and "My Week with Marilyn".
THE WHEELS of JUSTICE turn slowly - in this case, 385 years after Katharina Henot was burned at the stake in the German city of Cologne in 1627 for being a witch - as an extraordinary re-trial is to begin to clear her name ... which could pave the way for other similar hearings to take place.
FATHER-SON? - musician Bob Dylan and "Saturday Night Live's" Andy Samberg.
WHILE THE SUBJECT of how black women care for their hair is a popular subject - Chris Rock even produced a documentary on it - women of all races in the African nation of Namibia are fond of various styles (especially hair extensions).
ART NOTES - a survey of full-length portrait paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir - with many works on loan from international institutions (such as this one from Boston's MFA) are at the Frick Collection in New York City thru May 13th.
IF YOU DID NOT have a chance the other day to listen to the weekly NPR commentary by sportswriter Frank Deford - on the Division III basketball player given a chance to enter a game despite having suffered a major stroke - well, his essay "When There's More To Winning Than Winning" is available at the link in both audio and transcript form ... and is the best 3-1/2 minutes you'll spend today.
THURSDAY's CHILD is Shankly the Cat - an English kitteh who appeared in this space two weeks ago (courtesy of martyc35 with a short video at that link) by running onto the field of a Liverpool football (soccer) match, with the US-born goalkeeper Brad Friedel unable to scoop up 'Shanks'.
Well, the animal shelter where he was brought couldn't keep him under wraps either, as he battered down a
sealed cat flap - since, in the words of the shelter coordinator, street toms
'know every trick in the book'.
RECENT FLOODS forced the closure of a border crossing between Peru and Chile as flooded waterways destroyed crops, blocked highways, and .... uncovered land mines laid during border disputes in the 1970’s.
SEPARATED at BIRTH - veteran English singer Peter Noone (of "Herman’s Hermits") and stand-up Texas comedian Ron White ("Blue Collar Comedy Tour" and "You Can't Fix Stupid").
THE OTHER NIGHT I compiled a recap of the recent CPAC convention ... actually, an internal conservative debate (being held in public) about issues of sexuality at the convention. Some laughs, some seriousness ..... but a revealing look at how conservatives look at themselves, and what raises their ire ... or not .. so have a look at what Amanda Marcotte calls "an artifice that was painstakingly constructed over a period of decades .. crumbled in a week".
HAIL and FAREWELL to the man who invented the double-flipper on pinball games, Steve Kordek who has died at the age of 100. It was his 1948 invention that revolutionized pinball and made it the popular game it became ......
............ and to a fair number of people in the digital age: still is.
BRAIN TEASER - try this Weekly World News Quiz from the BBC.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after his death, the work and influence of Andy Warhol seems even stronger on today's art market than when he was alive.
FRIDAY's CHILD is the late Ozzie the Cat - who for fourteen years oversaw operations at a Missouri office supply store, acting as the store's greeter ... until a tumor reduced his weight from 16 to only 6 pounds, when he had to be put down.
......and finally, for a song of the week ............... another look at "musician's musicians" - not household names, better known for backing others (and some experiencing depression). But many are revered by more famous musicians for their abilities, often falling into what's now called "roots" music (where blues, rock, country and rockabilly meet) and their recorded legacy has outlasted some of their lives.
Case in point: in trying to draw a line from the first bluesman who cranked up his guitar amp to create a distorted sound - to the Hendrix/Page/Townshend power chord guitarists - that line must pass thru Link Wray who - if he never recorded another song than Rumble fifty years ago - would have a place in music history. And while he never scaled those heights again: he had a career worth noting.
Frederick Lincoln Wray (who had part Shawnee ancestry) was born in Dunn, North Carolina in 1929, with his family eventually settling in Maryland. Link served in the Korean War where he suffered from tuberculosis (eventually losing a lung). He concentrated on his guitar work and formed Lucky Wray and the Palomino Ranch Hands, a western-swing band in the mid-1950's.
This later evolved into the Ray Men when they became the house band on a Washington, D.C. TV show. Backing others (such as Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson) they became a more instrumental band (as Link's vocal abilities were limited due to the loss of that lung).
Then while backing-up The Diamonds in 1958, Link Wray improvised a 12-bar blues instrumental titled "Oddball" which had a distorted sound when Wray poked holes in his amplifier's speakers (much as Ike Turner's dropped-and-damaged amp delivered a sound on Rocket 88 he came to believe was advantageous). It was an audience hit, yet Cadence Records producer Archie Bleyer was unimpressed.
But his daughter loved it, telling Bleyer it reminded her of the rumble scenes in "West Side Story" and the song was renamed Rumble - which, while primitive: doesn't sound dated over fifty years later, and guitarists from Jimmy Page to Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix all cited the song as an influence. The Who's Pete Townshend went further: stating in liner notes (for a 1970 Link Wray album) that, but for that tune: "I would never have picked up a guitar". Some radio stations banned it (as 'encouraging teen violence') .. which only increased record sales.
Link and the Ray Men followed it up over the next few years with "Rawhide" and "Jack the Ripper" but then settled into an on-again-off-again remainder of his career. One reason is that record companies thought that - if they could dress him up and not be a juvenile delinquent poster child - he'd sell more records. Yet Link Wray was not cut out for playing "Claire de Lune"(!) as he did in 1960, and eventually Swan Records gave him room to stretch out. There were also periods of retirement, as well.
I recall him teaming up with rockabilly singer Robert Gordon throughout the 1970's and he eventually married and relocated to Denmark, as his audience as a solo performer increasingly shifted across the Atlantic. One band-member for a time in the 1980's was Anton Fig, who later joined Paul Shaffer's "Late Show" band. His last album was Barbed Wire from 2000 and his music was featured on such films as "Pulp Fiction", "Breathless" and John Waters' "Pink Flamingos".
Link Wray died in Copenhagen, Denmark in November, 2005 at the age of 76. Former Maryland Governor Erlich declared January 15, 2006 as Link Wray Day, and he was voted #45 on the Greatest Guitarists of All Time by Rolling Stone.
Wray has also been inducted into two Halls of Fame: those for Native American Music ... and for Rockabilly after his death. Rhino has a compilation album of note, and as long as guitarists want a sound that is anything-but-clean: the music of Link Wray will have a place.
If you haven't had a listen to Rumble in some time: then below you can see why this song made his career.
For a song with lyrics and even vocals by Link Wray: here is his 1979 version of Bob Dylan's It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - which below you can listen to.
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin' through
And it's all over now, Baby Blue
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it's all over now, Baby Blue