CollisionWorks

Whoa, a week since I've posted. Between the trip to Canada (Niagara Falls is awesome, but the immediate area around it is a strange combo of Times Square, Reno, and Coney Island -- probably exactly what they're trying to turn Coney Island into now), coming home, being pretty much unable to post from home, and dropping in daily at The Brick to check in with Inverse Theater to make sure everything is going okay, I haven't been able to get to anything. So, here I am at The Brick, jammed uncomfortably in the cramped area behind the bar/box office, hunched over, making my Friday update. At least it's a lot cleaner and more organized here -- the whole place had to be overhauled top to bottom before Inverse's production of Kirk Wood Bromley's The Death of Griffin Hunter came in this past Tuesday. The seating risers have been broken down and stowed, and the place is wide open -- it looks about a third bigger. The Inverse show looks to be good.


Soon, I promise, more actual THEATRE blogging -- an overview/postmortum on 2006 and preview of 2007, such as it is -- as well as some thoughts on film and music. Right now, I'm also dealing with trying to get person, life, work, and psyche in some more semblance of order.


So today, a quick combined Random 10 and Cat Blogging. The Random 10 comes courtesy of the new Xmas 80 GB iPod -- now filled with 18,615 songs, 64 GB (thanks Dad, thanks Ivy!). I have no new cat photos, so I'll pick a couple of past favorites to repost. Somehow, my Flickr photostream has exploded with views recently, and I have no idea where -- no one's commenting or favoriting much. Any ideas?


Random 10 with briefer notes; I'm uncomfortable, and want to go home from here as soon as I can.


1. "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" - The Temptations - The Ultimate Collection

Classic. Menacing. Beautiful. Funky.


2. "The Phantom Surfer" - The Tornadoes - More Surf Legends (and Rumors)

Cool until the singing starts, then it's damned kitschy. Shut up, man. Good guitar under that silly guy crooning.


3. "Dinner with Drac, pt. 2" - Zacherle - downloaded from somewhere

Novelty single, but funny. The b-side, almost identical to the a-side, with one altered verse. Dad gave me his copy when I was small, and I lost it (though I think my great-grandmother may have "disappeared" it). Sorry, Dad.


4. "Car Cheese Commercial Intro" - Windy Craig - The Best of The National Lampoon Radio Hour

"Yes, all the family loves cheese, but one member just isn't getting enough: Your car! As we're about to hear right now . . ."


5. "Spanish Harlem" - Ben E. King - Atlantic Rhythm & Blues vol 4: 1957-1958

Too familiar. Good anyway. Lieber, Stoller, Spector. Is King too slick? Maybe. Maybe just here.


6. "Heroes and Villains (alternate version)" - The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys

The "cantina" version. "You're under arrest!" A favorite. My theme song for a few years.


7. "Battle of the Bands" - The Sprague Brothers - Let the Chicks Fall Where They Fall

Weird. Where the hell did I get this? Cool, attitudinal. Hard. Rocking.


8. "California Sun" - The Ramones - Leave Home

Loud fast hard lovely.


9. "Stop Look and Listen" - Devo - Hardcore Devo 1

Early demos. Sharp yet sloppy. Not formed yet. Still good to hear.


10. "Santa Dog ' 78" - The Residents - Santa Dog '88 EP

Perfect representation of their sound from this period. One of the first songs of theirs I knew, and it got me at once.


And favorite old cat shots:



Moni Rolls Around



Hooker Naps



Curled up together.


More soon, I hope.

Well, here I am with my first Random Ten with the new iPod. I've loaded 281 songs into it from CDs I brought with me and (the majority) from the library of Berit's dad. And 55 of them have already played in the random playlist going on right now, so I got a real limited selection from which to have a random sampling.

But here it is in any case:


1. "The Island" - Millennium - The Sounds of Monsterism Island volume one

Sweet pretty hippie music. Not sure when from exactly; as I recall, this compilation is an odd mix of stuff from 1960-1971. I got it for $3.00 at Tower record last week in their closeout sale. Nice mix CD of tracks that go together, but don't seem to have any reason to -- exotica, garage rock, psychedelia, prog rock, even blues -- all segued nicely into a "mood" piece. Well worth it.


2. "Bone Chain" - Tom Waits - Orphans: Bastards

Short, cool, polyrhythmic, odd, unintelligible, percussive piece from the new compilation. Takes as long to play as to read these two sentences.


3. "Vengeance and Fashion" - Electric Six - Fire

Not my favorite song from one of my favorite albums of recent years, but still therefore a piece of utter rock-pop-metal-disco-synth brilliance. I was disappointed by their follow-up album, Senor Smoke, but the new one, Switzerland, is great, even if not quite up to Fire levels.


4. "Yo-Yo's Pad" - Man or Astro-Man? - Delphonic Sounds

Cool surfesque guitar instrumental. This is from a recent comp (also found in the Tower closeout) of newish bands covering songs originated on the oddball Del-Fi label out of L.A. So far, another good find.


5. "Surfin' U.S.A." - The Beach Boys - Greatest Hits

I have plenty of the Boys myself, and just put this in to have something in the iPod that I love, but this 2-CD comp on Razor and Tie is REALLY REALLY well-mastered! I'd link to it but I can't find it anywhere right now. If you just want the BEST Beach Boys stuff and aren't a crazy completist for Pet Sounds and Smile stuff, this is it here.


6. "One Thing Leads to Another" - The Fixx - Winning Combinations

Oh my, THIS is a blast from the past. That 80s sound! One of those songs that when I play, Berit laughs and asks if this was one of the songs I would hear at dances in my teen years where I would go and "wang-chung" myself all over the place.

Yeah. Okay. What of it?

Another cheapo Tower buy -- this one was about a buck. As the title might indicate, this isn't a "real" album, it's a comp of a handful of songs each from two 80s bands that had about that many songs you might, MIGHT, remember. Half of this CD is The Fixx, the other half is The Call. Remember them, The Call? "The Walls Came Down"? "Scene Beyond Dreams"? Yeah, didn't think so.


7. "2000 Light Years from Home" - The Rolling Stones - Singles Collection: The London Years

Another CD from my father-in-law-to-be's collection that I'd love to have. Well, got em on the iPod for now, at least. And I'm finding out how many B-sides I've never heard and how many A-sides and EP tracks I've underrated. Or album tracks, like this one, that make me reconsider going along with the "accepted wisdom" as re: those albums.

Satanic Majesties Request has some great songs on it. Fuck you.


8. "The World's Greatest Sinner" - The Dekes of Hazzard - Delphonic Sounds

Cool, honorable, faithful cover of the bizarre novelty song originally released on Del-Fi by Frank Zappa and Ray Collins (as "Baby Ray and the Ferns"). Written by Zappa as the theme song for the TRULY odd vanity film project by idiosyncratic character actor Timothy Carey, but not used in the film. Zappa's orchestral score for the film was later cannibalized into many Mothers songs and the score for 200 Motels.


9. "In My Room" - The Beach Boys - Greatest Hits

Jesus. Okay, this is the best I've ever heard this song sound, even with MP3 compression, on an iPod, with earbuds. You want a great Beach Boys comp, find this one if you can -- I couldn't find it on Amazon; there's like a dozen "Beach Boys Greatest Hits" comps and not this one.


10. "Ruby Tuesday" - The Rolling Stones - Singles Collection: The London Years

Jagger and Richards don't ever get enough credit for their songwriting, dammit.

This song always depresses me. It always feels like it's dragging up memories of a woman or a relationship that was actually part of my past, but it's not, really. There's nothing specific, nothing actually from my past, this song just makes it feel that way. Sniff


In a few hours, off to Canada for a Saturday wedding. Sunday, New Year's Eve with fireworks over Niagara Falls. Monday, home.

Tonight, a nice big dinner with Gary and Luana's friend Andy, the partner of the noted composer Daniel Pinkham, who passed away recently. Good food, good conversation, if a bit sad at times, given the circumstances.

Still have to write up some cat blogging and get some rest before 10 hours or so in the car tomorrow -- unfortunately for Gary and Luana, I can't help in the driving; never learned to drive stick . . .

I like to remember things my own way . . . not necessarily the way they happened . . .


I'd been wanting to put up occasional essays here about past shows -- looks back at some of the 50 productions I've put up, with my thoughts about them now.





However, without any kind of deadline, as well as self-consciousness about showing old medals, I haven't got round to it.





Luckily, Jon Stancato of The Stolen Chair Theatre Company, has given me a damned good reason to spout off about one of my favorite original shows, NECROPOLIS 1&2: World Gone Wrong/Worth Gun Willed.





Stolen Chair is doing a Noir for the stage opening January 5 called Kill Me Like You Mean It.





To tie in with their upcoming show, they've asked a number of other theatre people who've worked in the Noir style onstage to answer some questions about the form, their attraction to it, and what the Film Noir genre has to offer for theatre artists.





They are posting these online interviews on their blog. They're doing seven or eight of them, I think.





My look back at World Gone Wrong is #2 in the series, and can be found here. I think I finally got to say a lot of what I've wanted to say for some time about this show, which is one of the things I'm most proud of having created.





#1 in the series was Trav S.D. on Cold Fire, and coming up will be, among others, my old friend Frank Cwiklik.





Jon notes that there's been a LOT of Noir for the stage in recent years, with more coming up besides their production, and having a number of the creators of these shows talk about it on their blog is not only good publicity for their show, but a valuable way of examining this phenomenon.





It's also a nice excuse to post some of my favorite images from World Gone Wrong here. More can be found at my Flickr page. Enjoy. And please check out the interview.





photos from World Gone Wrong featuring (in order of appearance) Gyda Arber, Ian W. Hill, Gita Borovsky, Maggie Cino, Bryan Enk, Adam Swiderski, Amy Caitlin Carr, Ken Simon, Stacia French. Photos by Ian W. Hill and Amy Caitlin Carr. Poster/postcard graphic by Hill-Johnson.

On the road, here at Berit's parents' place.


We miss the kitties already.


So here they are, for us to sigh over. Our exciting pets:





Well, not always so exciting, but pretty sweet.





Very sweet when stretching amongst a random display of items on the couch.





And sometime one wonders just what they were just up to when you surprised them . . .


Maybe back with a Random Ten for Friday. Maybe not -- I don't have the usual iTunes setup with me, and I'd have to "arrange" a random selection out of whatever music I have on this laptop.

To reiterate, I'm stuck on dial up at a computer with a terrible monitor, with massively incorrect color and contrast. So I have no idea how these photos actually look, but they're on this hard drive, and I can't move them anywhere else anyway, so I might as well use them.


First, another sensitive shot of sensitive Simone:





And here, once again, Hooker makes his feelings apparent to me as regards his importance vs. what I'm trying to read (in this case, the morning paper):





And finally, a shot that for some reason always makes me think of them starring in a kitty Godot (Hooker as Estragon, Moni as Vladimir):

I actually almost lost track of the days for a second there.


Or at least, I woke up believing it was Thursday again for some reason. Lucas Krech's (Not So) Random Ten confused me, then reminded me. Jeez, have to get back to see INLAND EMPIRE again before it closes.


Still stuck on a slow dial-up connection, frustrated. Here's ten from iTunes this morning:


1. "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" - Bobby Whitlock - In Their Own Words

Lovely a capella version of the gospel standard performed by Whitlock at the Bottom Line from when they did their live series of songwriters playing and talking about their work. Builds nicely as the other songwriters onstage and then the audience join in.


2. "Big Black Mariah" - Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

Sounds so basic and stripped down now -- when this album first came out this sounded so strange and "experimental." Well, it was the 80s, and nothing exactly sounded like this, especially if you'd missed Waits' transition to this style with Swordfishtrombones and it came out of nowhere (my father got me into this album; he had heard "Clap Hands" on the radio and thought, "What the hell is Beefheart doing now?").


3. "Baloo's Blues" - Phil Harris - The Jungle Book

Cut song not used in the Disney animated film, performed by one of America's favorite TV alcoholics of the 50s and 60s. Really nice swinging vocal on this -- really too actually "bluesy" to belong in the film; also, it would have stopped the film dead, pacewise.


4. "Missione Morte Molo 83 (alternate version)" - Piero Piccioni - Cinematica - Italian Soundtracks from the 60's and 70's

Short pleasant library cue. Almost doesn't sound like Italian scoring, really. When it started and I wasn't looking to see what it was, I thought it was some Pye, Deram, or Joe Meek single from England in the 60s, and I expected a weedy singer to start up. Instead I got Italian strings and had to look. Poppy, peppy, and short.


5. "I Got to You" - Sapphire Thinkers - From Within

One more obscure/forgotten pop-folk-psychedelic band of the late 60s that I was collecting for a bit there as I worked on Temptation. Someday I'll weed out the worst songs of all of those groups; there are SO many bad ones still on here. This is a pretty, pleasant one though. It'll stay. Mamas & Papas harmonies over a "heavier" backing.


6. "Dave the Butcher" - Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones

Okay, iTunes, whatcha fuckin' with me for? Just had another Waits and mentioned this album, and you bring this Beefheart meets Weill instrumental up? It's like the sweetness of the last song needed an antidote.


7. "Comfortably Numb" - Pink Floyd - The Wall

Whoa. Forgot this teen-angst classic was in here. Ah, memories. Still love this one.

Lot more going on in the arrangement than I'd even noticed before, and I've listened to this more times than I can count (and on headphones). All kinds of strings and woodwinds over in the left channel during the verse. Hell, I can make out a specific oboe there, never caught that before. Ah, Bob Ezrin production/arrangement, nothing like it -- he's also responsible for the sound of The Most Depressing Record Ever Made, Lou Reed's Berlin, and he's in NYC leading the orchestra/chorus on the live version Reed's doing at St. Ann's Warehouse this weekend. Wish I could see that.

Ezrin's the guy who, when he needed children crying and screaming on Reed's song "The Kids," brought his two small kids into the studio and told them their Mommy was dead. Yeah, Berlin's a fun album. (I now see that, according the the Wikipedia entry on the album, Ezrin has said this is a myth -- but he's been perpetuating it more recently too, so who knows . . .)

Ah, that great guitar solo finale . . . always makes me think of Michael Mann films, as he's had his composers knock off this section to go behind bits of Thief and Manhunter. Probably used it as a temp track and asked the composers to stay close to it.


8. "On Lover's Hill" - John Leyton - Best of John Leyton

Ah, HERE's the weedy-singered 60s Brit pop song! Pretty and sweet. I dunno why, but I dig the kitschy 60s Britpop. I think this is Leyton post-Joe Meek; the production doesn't sound as idiosyncratic as Meek's bedroom productions.


9. "I Wanna Be a Boss" - Stan Ridgway - Partyball

A favorite song from a favorite songwriter (though his last couple albums were a bit of a disappointment), formerly of the band Wall of Voodoo. I used to play and sing this a lot myself for fun (it's good for hitting an acoustic guitar real hard on the chorus and bellowing the title). Favorite lines:


Now if I find a product I like
I'll buy up the whole company
And shave my face and grin and smile
And then I'll sell it on TV
And everyone will know me
I'll be more famous than Howard Hughes
I'll grow a long beard
And watch Ice Station Zebra in the nude!


10. "Wah-Wah" - George Harrison - All Things Must Pass

Song I like a lot and never think of. Not Phil Spector's best production -- as my old friend Johnny Dresden liked to say, by the point the Wall of Sound was becoming a Wall of Sludge, just a mass of undifferentiated tuned noise. This is from the original CD issue, and I've heard the reissue from a couple years ago is a LOT better, but it's not worth it to me to upgrade this one. It sounds like I remember the vinyl always sounding (I was REALLY into this album as a child).


I've been gradually fixing up the production photos from my shows and loading them into my Flickr stream, planning to share them here from time to time. So, a propos of nothing, a picture from my production of Richard Foreman's Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good, from February:





Here, The Radio Star (Alyssa Simon) is "comforted" by The Owner of The Radio Station (Moira Stone) after her vision of The False God (Bryan Enk), actually the Master Zookeeper in disguise.


Which reminds me, Bryan has a show at The Brick that Berit is running and helped design lights on -- the third in his series of adaptations of The Crow for the stage, this one in three sequential monologues. From what I heard, it sounded pretty good. Here's some info:


THE MURDER OF CROWS


Inspired by the work of James O'Barr
Written and Directed by Bryan Enk


Performed by
ADAM SWIDERSKI
BRITTON LAFIELD
and
JESSICA SAVAGE


Friday, December 15th at 10:30PM
Saturday, December 16th at 10:30PM
Wednesday, December 20th at 8PM
$5
Running time: 70 min.


The Brick Theater
575 Metropolitan Ave
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
L to Lorimer/G to Metropolitan


http://www.thirdlows.com/murderofcrows/

from The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus, 2006, in the section "American Pastoral: Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer":


In 1978, in The American Jeremiad, the historian Sacvan Bercovitch described the American artist as pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be"; the result was retreat, the artist taking refuge in the creation of "a haven for what Thoreau called 'the only true America'." That meant a place of concord and love where everybody knows everybody else: precisely what, in "the End of the Innocence," in 1989, Don Henley, unafraid of the wind he was blowing through fields of true American corn, so perfectly called "that same small town in each of us."

For David Lynch, though, the same small town in each of us has no meaning as a haven; it has meaning only as a cauldron. "I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret," the philosopher Norman O. Brown said in 1960, "and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged." For Lynch, America as it ought to be comes into being when the secret takes over the town that stands for the country, when the secret is revealed and then suppressed, reburied in the town cemetery, the new tombstone carrying the same Puritan death's-head-with-angel's-wings that was chiseled on the old one.

As Lynch wrote in the booklet that accompanied the soundtrack album for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in big letters filling an entire page as if scribbling graffiti on his own movie poster, "IN A TOWN LIKE TWIN PEAKS NO ONE IS INNOCENT."


Again, the simple, obvious phrase that stuck on me like a shirttail on a thorn when I reread it earlier today on the subway, and kept me from reading further, having to think instead . . .


. . . pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be" . . .

Still here on dial-up, frustratingly. The last few days have felt slow, like moving underwater, without a car or high-speed internet. Funny, I lived without them for years, and now it's taking twice as long to do EVERYTHING as it had been -- I spent three hours on the subway yesterday going to and from a matinee show in Queens, which would have taken me less than an hour by car. Having more "thoughtful, slow" time again, but I'm getting behind in THINGS I HAVE TO DO.


And also in things I DON'T HAVE TO DO BUT LIKE TO DO, AND ON TIME, like Friday Cat Blogging and Random Ten.


Random Ten looks to be a day late as a belated Saturday a.m. feature this week, and here, after way too much work, are the kitties for the week. I had to clean up the photos and upload them without the use of Photoshop and high-speed, and on an old computer with completely inaccurate color balances that I can't fix, so I have NO idea what these "actually" look like (and for reasons unknown to me, they seem to have uploaded in smaller form than they were supposed to . . .). Hope they're okay.


First, "standard" Moni pose, dreaming of little flittery things she can kill:





And Hooker, in one of his less-enjoyable standard modes, apparently in the middle of changing the sheets on the bed, when he suddenly wants to play, and play rough:





And here's what happens whenever I start to pack for a trip -- I pull out my blue dufflebag, put it down on the bed, turn around to the shelves of clothes to grab a bunch of t-shirts or something, and turn back around to find this:

A late-night/early-morning random ten before bedtime, just to get it done. Headphones on, MST3K playing on the TV as always at this hour, helping with insomnia a bit. Have to try and get SOME sleep. But first . . .


1. "The River" - PJ Harvey - Is This Desire?

Berit's the big PJ Harvey fan in the house, though I like most of her music myself. This is a slow one, and I generally like her loud nasty ones, but this is pretty and pleasant and perfect for a quiet late night.


2. "Teenage Dream" - T.Rex - History of T.Rex -- The Singles Collection

Oh, cool. Also perfect and mellow for a pre-sleep mix. I love T.Rex, and luckily don't actually know all of the songs I have from this extensive compilation backwards and forwards yet (except for those on Electric Warrior and Dandy in the Underworld, the only albums of Bolan's I had for years), so whenever they come up on random it's like hearing a rare favorite on the radio unexpectedly. Whatever happened to the teenage dream? Still trying to figure that one out myself.


3. "In the City" - The Jam - D.I.Y.: Anarchy in the UK - UK Punk I (1976-77)

Well, there goes the mellow. Don't mind when it's something this great. Green Day wishes they could do this.


4. "Gimme Shelter" - The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed

Oh, dear. This is one of my favorite recordings of all time, and how can I say anything about it? The perfection of the ominous slowed-down-Chuck Berry riff at the opening? The amazing sound of Jagger's harmonica? Merry Clayton's backing vocals and solo moment?

No. All of it is one, and too physical, too tactile to try to get across. It makes me afraid and comforts me at the same time. Produces hallucinatory images.

I wound up in the middle of the Tompkins Square Park riot in the Summer of 1988, fireworks going off, horses running, snipers on rooftops. Bad craziness. My friend Vanessa, who told me to come down and take photos, and who had been in riots before, grabbed me when the cops started beating people randomly on Avenue A and threw me into a bar on 9th Street off the park that had sealed itself up tight (she knew the doorman and was able to talk me in) and I stayed in there for some time as the screaming filtered in from outside, drowned out mostly by what I assume was a tape the bartender was playing which included this song and Jagger's "Memo from Turner" from Performance. Far too appropriate.

Vanessa eventually came in when she though the coast was clear out there, and brought me out to "safety," and I started west down 9th Street, stopping to photograph a helicopter hovering just over the rooftops at the corner of 1st Avenue, then turning to snap another shot of a large group of cops in full riot gear in front of P.S. 122. As I turned away to go there were shouts, and I turned back to find the cops splitting up and rushing at people all around, three of them coming at me. Thinking if I stood still and didn't run I would be identified as a "civilian," I did so, and was shoved against the metal gate of the fabric store on the corner (it's a pizza place now) and beaten with nightsticks. I put on an English accent and started yelling that I was a tourist, and that made them hesitate enough for me to start running away down the sidewalk. Another cop started chasing me on the other side of the parked cars, and as I kept yelling my tourist claim, he slowed up and called after me, "Wrong night to come to town, mister!"

My right thigh and the underside of my right arm spent many weeks going through an astonishing series of color changes -- I never KNEW the spectrum that skin was capable of. I now have a large oval patch on my thigh where the skin is either numb or feels of pins and needles most of the time (sometimes cold and painful ones). I didn't associate the weird nerve thing with getting beaten there until Berit asked me a few years ago if they were connected, and I realized the numb patch is exactly the same as the bruised area from the beating. I don't understand how one could lead to the other, but the coincidence seems a bit much.

I've never printed my photos from that night, just a contact sheet. Maybe sometime I will. I want to look at that photo of the cops before they came at me for real.

This song brings every feeling of that night back, and then gently pushes them away again. Shelter.


5. "Thunder and Rain" - Alan Dean & His Problems - Joe Meek Presents 304 Holloway Road

From the sublime to the ridiculous, albeit the gloriously ridiculous. Early 60s Brit-pop, heavily compressed, mono, hysterically-pitched, everything on its sleeve. Back to the real world.


6. "You're Driving Me Insane" - The Missing Links - Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond

More Brit-pop, later, more garage-y, psychedelic-y. They've been listening to The Yardbirds (but who wasn't?), but aren't trying too hard to imitate them. Good idea. Doing fine on their own. Primitive and basic. Reminds me a bit of The Monks.


7. "Donegal Express" - Shane MacGowan & The Popes - The Snake

Fun vulgar number from post-Pogue Shane still sounding like his old band. Could he not?


8. "Chains of Love" - Pat Boone - Back to the 50's vol. 6

Oh, jesus fuck a shit souffle! Well, this is what I get for not going through all of the compilations I download carefully. Pat Boone, for the love of pete!

That said, this isn't as bad as it could be. If it was actually at double time all around, it might be a good peppy pop number -- but at this draggy pace it's SO dopey I can't keep it in the iTunes. When it's over, it goes.


9. "Queen Bitch" - David Bowie - Hunky Dory

Okay, another favorite. What else to say? You know, you know it. You don't, you should. Someday I'll upload and share the cover I did of this around '92 or '93 - one of the best recordings I ever did, even if I was REALLY sick and feverish and I played the damn riff BACKWARDS. Still worked. I was in bed for days after.


10. "You Know I Know" - John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection: 1948-1990

From Berit's collection, another artist I love and don't know as well as her, and a song I'm not sure I ever heard before, and it's great. Damn I do love the man. Damn I wish I could sing along with this at the top of my lungs right now.


Okay, one or two more for just myself, and so to bed . . .

Oh, I am such a sucker for the peer pressure of an internet meme . . .


Since three of my online friends have posted their results from this online quiz (albeit only two publicly), I might as well add mine:













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