Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) SDA Late Nite Radio.
Tonight’s selection is a light-hearted paean of sorts to the quotidian pleasures of long-distance domestic bus travel. Massachusetts native Jonathan Richman paints a picture, in short strokes, of the on-the-ground American expanse and the motley group of strangers who find themselves barreling down the highway together for a moment in time before disembarking, at various announced stops, to persevere with their unknown lives. We’re talking drunks, wailing infants, welfare moms, grit, rolling pop cans on the floor, unpleasant smells – and he likes it. Here it is: Richman’s live performance of You’re Crazy For Taking The Bus.
SDA Readers and visitors are invited, as always, to provide links to any interesting blog posts, news items, essays, ephemera or interesting tidbits you feel might be of interest to others.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, as we near the end of a prolonged cold snap, we treat ourselves to the warm, dulcet tones of Spike Jones and Red Ingle, as they tug at our heartstrings with a caring, sharing performance of You Always Hurt The One You Love. (Album version here.)
You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight’s selection artfully juxtaposes a (lyrically) austere, Old Testament-inspired song with selected scenes from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (also austere) 1964 film The Gospel According To St. Mathew. The combination is not, as one might expect, doubly austere, but rather lyrical and rapturous, and almost transcendent.
Like other neorealist directors Pasolini used non-professional actors almost exclusively, and in The Gospel According to St. Mathew he took this approach a step further: many of the seemingly endless cast aren’t actors at all, amateur or otherwise, and don’t act, or speak, or perform any actions at all; rather, their faces, and the hardship and concerns written on them, as seen in seemingly endless, lingering close-ups, are used to serve the – biblical, in this case – narrative.
Serves tonight’s song too, as it turns out. This one won’t be to everyone’s taste – what is, really? – but I like it, and you never know how long a particular video will be available, so here it is: an interesting visual treatment of Bob Dylan’s When He Returns.
Your Reader Tips are welcome, as always, in the comments.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight’s musical selection has a personal historic significance: when I first heard it, at the Edmonton Folk Festival, it was the only time in my life I’ve ever danced non-volitionally – as in, I didn’t even notice I was dancing until I was three feet in the air for the tenth time.
The twelve performers onstage in The Idan Raichel Project had been selected from a much larger group of seventy musicians, including Yemenis and Ethiopian Jews, brought together several years earlier by a brilliant young Israeli keyboardist named Idan Raichel for an ambitious recording project.
The brilliant contrapuntal energy – rhythmic and tonal – in the lower frequencies doesn’t come through in an online video, but hopefully the remarkable, electrifying spirit of the music will. Here then, without further ado, The Idan Raichel Project performs Back to Jerusalem.
The thread is open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the (day-early) EBD edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight we feature some comedy gold in the form of a musical performance by Virginia O’Brien. Her unique singing style, according to IMDB, was created by accident during her show business debut:
On opening night, when time came for her solo number, Virginia became so paralyzed with fright that she sang her song with a wide-eyed motionless stare that sent the audience (which thought her performance a gag) into convulsions. Demoralized, Virginia left the stage only to soon find out that she was a sensation.
The following year a New York Times critic who reviewed her Broadway debut gave this apt description: “She convulses the audience by removing the ecstasy from high-pressure music.”
Here, in a brief but memorable appearance as a department store salesclerk in the 1941 Marx Brothers movie The Big Store, Virignia O’Brien – aka Miss Deadpan – performs a vaguely unsettling, riotously funny version of Rock-a-bye Baby. Absolutely priceless.
The thread is open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio.
Peter Lilley, one of several senior members of Britain’s ruling Tory party who are questioning whether the science of AGW is settled, and whether a political consensus on AGW actually exists, is quoted in today’s Independent as saying that the “effects (of global warming) tend to be exaggerated.”
In the ongoing debate over AGW, this important question of whether we actually know that a one or two degree increase would lead to environmental Armageddon has been pushed off the proverbial radar screen. Well, never mind a degree or two, let’s up the ante: in tonight’s musical selection, flamboyant Australian songwriter/entertainer Peter Allen is practically on fire as he commences to perform his signature song I Go To Rio, and when he does burst into flames at around the 2:25 mark, he simply grabs a hand fan and uses it to fan the flames! What panache!
Feel free to grab your own maracas and bunny hop your Reader Tips into the comments.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. In tonight’s musical selection Texas native George Strait warns of interpersonal climate change, in his performance of Carter Wood’s ridiculously catchy Don’t Make Me Come Over There And Love You.
The comment thread is open for any interesting/timely tips you’d like to pass along to your fellow SDA readers.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio.
Tonight, under the aegis of SDA’s ongoing Cultural Outreach Program, which was hopelessly designed to further awareness and understanding between disparate communities, we present a Queen’s English translation of a volubly heated freestyle Rap Battle. The debate format is as follows: practitioner Hydrogen asserts his thesis, Boost is given the opportunity to provide his counterargument, and then the floor is opened to questions and comments.
Feel free to flamboast your crunkest Cronkites furilla in the comments.
We Are What You Eat
Writing in the Washington Post, Professor James E. McWilliams, author of “Just Food”, recounts giving a speech in Texas on the “environmental virtues” of a vegetarian diet. It was not well-received. One man told him, during the Q&A, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”
McWilliams:
I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?
We know more than we’ve ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives — the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need.
So it’s hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political…
Watch out – he’s making a move for your fork:
We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests. But I wonder — are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we’ve been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice.
Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.
(emph. mine)
Reader Tips
It’s been hard not to notice in the last few years that women are disproportionately represented among the group of conservatives who take courageous stands and give no quarter to useful idiots. For some reason, conservative women like Sarah Palin, Kate, Kathy Shaidle, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter and many others – and even Democrats like Camille Paglia – are more likely than the men-folk to step to the front lines, and less likely to waffle and beat around the bush and pointlessly split hairs when important issues are being addressed.
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, in tribute to the women who continue to change the terms of the debate, we present a song about a strong woman who takes control of her own life by changing – to an invigoratingly epic degree – that which needs to be changed. Here’s Lucinda Williams in a live performance of Changed The Locks. Turn it up.
Feel free to change the Reader Tips thread with your timely and interesting tips and comments.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight we feature a cartoon mash-up in which the audio of Peter Lorre’s monologue in Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M is completely mis-translated and the resulting subtitles added to an old episode of Quick Draw McGraw.
Here then, without further ado, is the historic SDA premiere of Merrill Markoe’s nightmarish Quickdraw Noir.
The thread is open for your relentless Reader Tips.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight, in light of the recent and seemingly endless list of bureaucratic-mandarin/internationalist/multiculturalist impositions on western culture – most severely, perhaps, in Britain – and the concomitant retreat of the citizenry, we feature a song about sort of struggle, self-defense and resistance of a sort that sadly may no longer sufficiently exist among the often shrugging and ovine western children of the enlightenment.
The song opens with a recitation of Seamus Heaney’s poem Requiem for the Croppies, which commemorates the Easter Rebellion of 1916 when a citizen army of Irish nationalists took up arms against British rule. The song itself, though, is not so much about politics as it is about tenacity, resolve, love and courage in the face of mortal threat.
Here then, without further ado, Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy stand up in a hall full of their fellow crackers to perform Makem’s stirring Four Green Fields.
The thread is open for Reader Tips.
Reader Tips
Good evening, welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Normally we select songs that are obscure, or at least not very familiar, as opposed to mass-marketed ones. I’m going to make an exception tonight; in light of the protesters who keep showing up at G.W. Bush’s Canadian speaking engagements, this one’s just too appropriate to pass up.
Here it is, then: comedian Andy Samberg, portraying a one man army of righteous political dissent, works himself into a lather with a musical denunciation of the “system” entitled I Threw It On The Ground.
Feel free to throw down your Reader Tips in the comments.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight PJ Harvey and Nick Cave rework
Here are Nick Cave and PJ Harvey in a live performance of Henry Lee.
Lean yourself against the fence, and plug your Reader Tips in the thread.
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight we take you back to 1962-era France, where having bad teeth was quite clearly no obstacle to being a national sex symbol. Here’s the nonetheless fetching Sylvie Vartan, dancing up a storm and tormenting non-French-speaking men with the pop-musical question Est-ce que tu le sais?
Say “cheese.”
Feel free to dance your Reader Tips into the comments.
Canadian women: I’m leaving you, Michael
The numbers from yesterday’s Strategic Counsel poll, which show the Conservatives sitting at 41 percent nationally and 46 percent in Ontario, must be a bit of a shock to Ignatieff’s team, but perhaps the most significant numbers are those showing a rather stunning level of change in the level of women’s support for the Liberals. The Liberals have historically held a significant advantage in that regard, but the poll shows women’s preferences practically reversed from April: 36 percent of women polled now prefer the Conservatives, compared to only 28 percent for the Liberals.
What could account for this stunning turn? Ignatieff doesn’t exactly come across as a redneck wife beater. The problem can’t attributed to his undeniably vampire-like physiognomy either, inasmuch as vampires are hugely popular these days in popular romance entertainment. So why are female voters storming out, proverbially speaking, and calling a cab? Is it his dainty hand gestures? Is it the way he seems to be in a perpetual state of outrage without him ever giving a genuine reason for it? Is it perhaps the dry rustling sound emanating from his head each time he arches one of his thatchy brows?
In the interests of exploring the possible reasons for the rather stunning turn among women, I invite our female readers to give their own personal take.
Male readers may speculate wildly.
Paging Rube Goldberg
Former consumer protection commissioner Mark A. Shiffrin, and Avi Silberschatz, a computer science professor at Yale, suggest in an op-ed at the NYT that the way to solve the problem of distracted drivers texting and using cellphones is not by outlawing the practice — “too many drivers value convenience more than safety and would assume they wouldn’t get caught” – but by using an elegant technological solution:
“When a cellphone is used in a moving car, its signal must be handed off from one cell tower to the next along the route. This process tells the service provider that the phone is in motion. Cellphone towers could be engineered to not transmit while a phone is traveling. After a phone had stopped moving for a certain amount of time — three minutes, maybe — it would be able to transmit again.”
But what about non-drivers, say, carpoolers in the back seat trying to coordinate their morning meetings? They’ve got that covered, too:
“It is…easy to imagine technology that would only allow passengers to use their phones – by tethering them to devices, placed on the passenger side of the car, that would override the system.” (emph. mine)
Next problem: cell-phone users who might disable their phones by walking too fast. Electro-shock pedometers, anyone?
Mixed-species martial arts
First results just in: Tiger by KO early in round one.
A man has been sent to hospital with serious injuries after being attacked by a tiger at the Calgary Zoo early Monday morning, officials said.
Zoo staff says two men snuck into the zoo around 1 a.m. local time, unnoticed, and decided to visit the tiger enclosure….
It’s not about who wins, it’s about who shows up.
Town Hall Terrorists
As I was scrolling down yesterday through a large collection of photos of the 9-12 Tea Party in Washington, I was struck by how very unlike a typical anti-Bush/anti-capitalism protest it was. It was a lot larger, for one thing, but what really stood out was that the protesters looked like regular folks who’d been picked at random from a cross section of mostly over-thirty Americans. Some of the placards mocked Obama (“Obama Rx Kool-Aid,” “Gangster”) but most were either of the “don’t tread on me” variety (“Enough!”) or about patriotism, liberty, and the Founding Fathers. Despite the huge crowd, there was no window-smashing, and nothing resembling a riot.
It’s not a coincidence that these peaceful protesters are the first in recent memory to be openly characterized by high-ranking Democrats and their pro-Obama media partners as a dangerous, dumb mob. MSNBC’s Keith Olberman – having apparently slept through the protests of the Bush years when comparisons of George Bush to Hitler were as predictable as the movement of a second hand on a clock – said, accompanied by the onscreen graphic “Political Terrorism,”
“When Hamas does it, or Hezbollah does it, it is called terrorism. Why should Republican lawmakers and the astroturf groups organizing on behalf of the health-care industry be viewed any differently, especially now that far too many tea-party protesters are comparing president Obama and health care reform to Hitler?”
Two weeks ago House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, responding to a leading question about the overall “tone” of the debate, suggested that all this anti Obama-agenda talk is dangerous, and that those who engage in such rhetoric will collectively have to shoulder the blame for any future acts of violence that might be committed. As you watch the video pay special attention to how she *deliberately* chokes up, and in so doing perfects the art of using maudlin hypocrisy for political advantage:
“I think we all have to take responsibility for our actions and our words. We are a free country, and this balance between freedom and safety is one that we have to carefully balance. I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this myself in the late seventies in San Francisco, this kind of rhetoric was very frightening, and it gave, it created a climate in which violence took place, but I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made, to understanding that some of the people that the, ears that it are falling on, are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume. But again, our county is great because people can say what they think and they believe, but I also think that they have to take responsibility for any incitement they may cause.”
I don’t recall Nancy Pelosi or any Democrat choking up and giving a lecture about the necessity of taking responsibility for “incitement” when a documentary-style film about the assassination of George Bush (which, incidentally, won the International Critics prize at the Toronto International Film Festival) was released three years ago. When Bush effigies were being hung from nooses, and burned and pelted with rocks (and later, shoes), and as agitated people screamed themselves hoarse, there was never a suggestion, let alone a lecture, from either the media or the Democrats about how such protesters needed to “take responsibility for any incitement they might cause.”
Oh well. When anti-capitalist/anti-Bush protesters were expressing their views, it was just pure, sweet, gentle, fun for the whole family, and all for a good cause. It’s an entirely different and more ominous spectre, obviously, when the policies of a crypto-communist are being opposed by peaceful, utterly non-radical, middle-American taxpayers.
Be sure to watch the hypocritical Pelosi in action.
The 2016 Me Olympics
In a failed attempt to sway the the IOC’s selection committee into awarding Chicago the 2016 Summer Olympics, which went instead to Rio de Janeiro (see Paul’s vid below), the ever-grinning Barack Obama landed in Copenhagen yesterday to deliver a four-“I” plea:
“I’ve come here today to urge you to choose Chicago for the same reasons I chose Chicago nearly twenty-five years ago – the reasons I fell in love with the city I still call home.”
Michelle Obama plied the “wife of I” gambit:
“I was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, not far from where the Games would open and close,” she said.
(….)
Michelle Obama talked about her late dad who suffered from multiple sclerosis.
Alas, someone in Brazil’s delegation once lived in Rio, and had a great-uncle with angina.