INTRODUCTION
Here's where I introduce the Songie Awards for Musical Excellence in Music. The complex and intricate nominating process, devised by the American Academy for Songie Award Recognition (hereafter referred to as The AASAR, The Academy, or Me, after its sole, self-ordained member), is as follows: the songs are selected by a panel of AASAR judges (also just me), and YouTube video* of the artist/performance/recording in question, along with a description of said artist/performance/recording outlining the opinion of the ruling Academy members (once again, just me; you get the jist of it). The nominees will be placed in categories determined by a vigorous classification system (my whims) befitting the artist/performance/recording's merits.
Once a Songie nominee is nominated, NO WINNERS WILL BE CHOSEN. Like the Special Olympics or Keith Olbermann's Worst Persons in the World, it is impossible to find a single, definite winner; to be nominated is honor enough. A single honoree in a category does not necessarily imply sole and absolute greatness. It could mean that, rather than being "the absolute greatest," it is "one of the greatest," or at least "really, really, really good." It may also imply laziness on the part of the Academy.
So, without further ado, the Academy's first list of nominees...
* * *
This batch of Songies originates from my own curiosity about songs The Beatles wrote and then gave away to other artists looking to see if that Lennon-McCartney magic might rub off on them. They gave "I Wanna Be Your Man" to the Rolling Stones, "A World Without Love" to Peter and Gordon, "Come And Get It" to Badfinger, and a bunch of other songs to a bunch of other people no one's heard of outside of Britain in the 1960s (as an American born in the 1980s, I'm fascinated by all this - "who the fuck are Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas?"). With this in mind, the Academy has chosen to honor two outstanding performances in this field:
BEST MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN BEATLES SONG:
"SOUR MILK SEA." Written by George Harrison, performed by Jackie Lomax, 1968.
Like Badfinger, Jackie Lomax was one of the star artists on The Beatles' ill-fated Apple Records; he was also the bassist and lead singer for The Undertakers, one of The Beatles' fellow Liverpool-area bands. For his first single on Apple as a solo artist, The Beatles gave him a song George had written in India while studying under the Maharishi. What adds to what is already a great song is that it's this close to being a Beatles recording - not only did George play but he's on guitar (including the second part of the guitar solo), but Paul is on bass and Ringo is on drums. In brief, you have all the instrumental makings, all the quirks and nuances, that makes a Beatles song great. Add to that Eric Clapton on lead guitar between the vocal lines, and session virtuoso Nicky Hopkins on piano, and you have a killer recording.
CORNIEST MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN BEATLES SONG:
"LIKE DREAMERS DO." Written by John Lennon & Paul McCartney, performed by The Applejacks, 1964.
So many of the early-60s Beatles covers I've heard show how instrumentally ahead of the rest of the British music scene The Beatles were. If Lennon's furiously strummed guitar, McCartney's deep, melodic bass, Harrison's country-twinged lead guitar, and Starr's pounding, open hi-hat drums all sound tame by today's standards, then their contemporaries of '63-'64 were complete and utter featherweights. The Stones had barely started out; The Kinks and The Who were still at the gates - no one else could do rock and roll seriously. If The Beatles were Beethoven and The Who were Wagner, everyone else was Montelvani or Muzak. It's hard to find the most sterile, tippy-toed version of a Beatles-penned song out there, but one must admit, The Applejacks' "Like Dreamers Do" takes the cake.
The song is among the first that Lennon/McCartney (actually, McCartney) wrote; The Beatles even recorded a version for their ill-fated Decca Records audition with Pete Best on drums - that turned up on the Anthology CD set in the 1990s. As for The Applejacks: from what those freeloaders on Wikipedia tell me, they were a bunch of scout members who decided to form a band together. A few years afterward, they scored some kind of a low-level hit with this one - after they added a cutesy piano hook and saccharined it up before saccharine even existed.
To listen to the song itself is enough to merit its nomination, but the video here pushes it over the top. Showing the full scope of their rock 'n roll rebellion, these long-haired badasses (actually, only one of them has long hair - and she's a girl) duke out the shit by sitting rigidly still - in sweater vests! - with their instruments cocked about 35 degrees to the right, and with artifically cheery smiles placed unnaturally on their faces! I can't stop laughing when I catch sight of the drummer, who, apart from being the spitting image of Eric "Stumpy" Pepys (Spinal Tap's first drummer, who died in a bizarre gardening accident), was born with an industrial-strength rod up his ass. One YouTube user compared him to Ringo in his overall geekiness, but I dispute that by the fact that Ringo's torso isn't fused to a block of granite.
I shouldn't say any more - just watch and enjoy.
*Video may consist of an album cover or still image slideshow over the sound of music, where actual video may be unavailable.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
Non-Literature Literature: Shakespeare & Pink Floyd
I always thought you can get a fantastic level of truth from any form of art - be it music, film, visual art, photography, or whatever. We teach English and American literature in public schools, as if the printed page were the only conduit of truth - yet there are surprising parallels between poetry and prose and other forms of art. We concentrate on literacy, which obviously is important to a functioning society, but we leave out the appreciation of the higher arts - and even some of the lower arts - to develop a full-bodied mind, a mind capable of thinking fluidly and communicating with images and sounds as well as letters and numbers.
I was considering the following passage from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (I feel that, despite the fact that all we can credit as Shakespeare's is the text, the full experience comes from seeing and hearing one of his plays well stage and delivered. Nevertheless, I'm reproducing the text only here - imagine whichever intonation and visual image you want):
[THESEUS:] The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imatination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imatination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear!
[Act V, Scene i, Lines 7-22]
The whole celebration of what one might call deliciously warped minds - atypical thinking - and the rolling of the lines in my mind: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet...The lunatic...The lunatic..."
Naturally, where was there to go but the song "Brain Damage," from Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon? Obviously songwriter Roger Waters had former bandmate Syd Barrett in mind, who had written most of their first record and pointed the band toward a trippy, spacey musical direction. Of course, in the year since their first record, Barrett's overuse of LSD, combined with an already less-than-stable mental condition (speculations run from schizophrenia to Asperger's syndrome) led him to erratic, unpredictable performances and his inevitable departure from the band, from whence he released a few solo albums and lived in seculsion in his Cambridge home before dying in 2006. This fascination shows up constantly in Waters' songwriting with Pink Floyd, and no more poigniantly than in "Brain Damage."
The version below is not the 1973 album version (which is fantastic nonetheless), but a very recent video of Waters playing the song solo, preceded by him describing the song and his motives behind it. The lack of any accompaniment other than his own sparse, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, combined with his own voice, which by now has cracked and weakened with age, gives the performance an incredible frailty and tenderness that makes it transcendent, and one of my favorite recordings.
London 1595
London 1973
Brooklyn 2008
I was considering the following passage from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (I feel that, despite the fact that all we can credit as Shakespeare's is the text, the full experience comes from seeing and hearing one of his plays well stage and delivered. Nevertheless, I'm reproducing the text only here - imagine whichever intonation and visual image you want):
[THESEUS:] The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imatination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imatination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear!
[Act V, Scene i, Lines 7-22]
The whole celebration of what one might call deliciously warped minds - atypical thinking - and the rolling of the lines in my mind: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet...The lunatic...The lunatic..."
Naturally, where was there to go but the song "Brain Damage," from Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon? Obviously songwriter Roger Waters had former bandmate Syd Barrett in mind, who had written most of their first record and pointed the band toward a trippy, spacey musical direction. Of course, in the year since their first record, Barrett's overuse of LSD, combined with an already less-than-stable mental condition (speculations run from schizophrenia to Asperger's syndrome) led him to erratic, unpredictable performances and his inevitable departure from the band, from whence he released a few solo albums and lived in seculsion in his Cambridge home before dying in 2006. This fascination shows up constantly in Waters' songwriting with Pink Floyd, and no more poigniantly than in "Brain Damage."
The version below is not the 1973 album version (which is fantastic nonetheless), but a very recent video of Waters playing the song solo, preceded by him describing the song and his motives behind it. The lack of any accompaniment other than his own sparse, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, combined with his own voice, which by now has cracked and weakened with age, gives the performance an incredible frailty and tenderness that makes it transcendent, and one of my favorite recordings.
London 1595
London 1973
Brooklyn 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
This Day in Historicalistics: April 27
A brief note of explanation: Historicalistics, a field of study developed by Dr. Henry R. Borgnine of Stanford University,* is related to history but differing from history per se in that what historicalistics says is not true. Much the same difference can be seen by comparing astronomy and astrology, or science and scientology.
Today, April 27, 2008, marks the 325th anniversary of the colostomy bag, invented by a team of French physicians in 1683 at the behest of King Louis XIV, who had become fed up after overhearing comments from his servants such as "King Louis pulls down his pants and goes to the bathroom, just like we do..."
*"Dr. Henry R. Borgnine of Stanford University" is a pseudonym for this author. Historicalistics at work!
Today, April 27, 2008, marks the 325th anniversary of the colostomy bag, invented by a team of French physicians in 1683 at the behest of King Louis XIV, who had become fed up after overhearing comments from his servants such as "King Louis pulls down his pants and goes to the bathroom, just like we do..."
*"Dr. Henry R. Borgnine of Stanford University" is a pseudonym for this author. Historicalistics at work!
Friday, April 25, 2008
B[ack]LOG!
I'm sure you've noticed that I haven't really posted anything for - God, what is it now? - thirty years? I've got a lot of drafts on their way, waiting to be finished and published but ultimately backlogged, thanks to a combination of heavy schoolwork, live performances, and a dash of just plain laziness. I apologize for this delay and will be posting again in a shorty. Please be patient.
Trieste 1908
Brooklyn 2008
Trieste 1908
Brooklyn 2008
Monday, November 26, 2007
An Open Letter: I Am Your Scab Writer
Well, today, according to the AP’s Gary Gentile (by way of the Huffington Post), writers and strikers are set to return to negotiations that could potentially settle the writer’s strike that began earlier this month. Of course, months ago, I reserved tickets for my parents, Meg, and I for tomorrow's Daily Show - which, as it turns out, will not be written, performed, taped, or aired. All because of the writers' curious demand that they get "paid" for their "writing" of "shows" that we "watch." Yeah, nice try, Stalin.
Anyway, I do miss the shows that were put on hiatus during the course of the strike. I’ve been so starved of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report that I’ve been forced to turn to “news sources” for actual news. In comparison, it's pretty dull, apart from some Keith Olbermann action and that moment when we finally got to see Anderson Cooper’s face fall off (for those of you who missed it, it was on YouTube for a while until CNN claimed copyright infringement).
Now, I’m an aspiring writer and a liberal, pro-union Democrat, so I’m generally on the side of the writers. On the other hand, I’m also an aspiring writer and an opportunistic, pro-glory Me-Publican*, so I saw this as a golden opportunity. What follows is an open letter to the producers of New York-based TV comedy shows. I hope they and all both of this blog’s readers will hear my plea.
* * *
November 26, 2007
Dear Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live, et al.
I get where you’re coming from. I understand what it’s like to be hemorrhaging money at a rate of thousands of cents a month. We both know what it’s like to struggle. I’m eating in more often, you’re nudging it down to just two lines of coke per hooker’s chest per day – we’re all sacrificing.
And I’m sure that, with the strike and all, you could really use some outside writing talent to get those moneymaker shows off the ground again. After all, you can’t write those shows yourself, can you? Not with your lack of writing expertise, your inability to type well or use a computer, your complete and clinical humorlessness that has a tendency to suck away any and all neighboring sources of joy like a massive black hole in the center of the - I digress. Heyyy, you're alright.
If it's scab writing you're looking for, then a scab you have found. I am your scab writer. I can, will, must, and do scab write for a living. I’ve written for Johnny Carson during the ’88 strike, at which time I was one and a half years old and thus ineligible for legal hire by any employer (though I understand SNL continues to employ seven-year-olds in their writing staff). Still, I churned out the funny, pounding away on my old Smith-Corona from deep inside my abandoned hanger at LAX.
I've been delivering said funny for almost twenty years now, and continue to do today for a number of programs, though for some reason they still deny me health coverage...which is a real shame, since that raging case of scurvy I've come down with has been acting up lately. Among the more prestigious shows on my resume...
YEAR(S)---SHOW----------REASON LEFT
1990-92---(REDACTED)---
1993-95---(REDACTED)---
1996-99---(REDACTED)---"Please, Mr. Smigel, can I have some more?"
2000-02---(REDACTED)---Sent to Guantanamo Bay for 7 months for visiting WGA website.
2003-07---(REDACTED)---
Between my past writing gigs, I've managed to sustain myself with supplemental jobs, including bridge troll, street urchin, highway drifter, street troll, bridge drifter, highway urchin, street drifter, bridge urchin, and meth dealer. My ability to find supplemental income means there is no need for you to pay me a decent living wage; in any case, a decent living wage for me need not be very much, since on my journeys I have learned to live without extravagant luxuries like running water or clean underwear. Also, I learned how to kill a rat with a pencil.
I will work for minimum wage. I will work for no wage. I will pay to work. I will work below the rates of outsourced labor (an added bonus for you - not having to pay any of those pesky Mandarin-to-English translators!). I have no trouble earning supplemental income; I will accept non-monetary forms of compensation: old yogurt cup scrapings, torn shirts covered in axle grease, an Associate Producer credit, oral sex – anything. I’m very, very hungry/cold/opportunistic/horny.
Please let me know of any possible openings you may have. As I have no official mailing address, please send your reply to the following address: Elliott Christ, Chairman & CEO, Elliott Christ Productions, Behind the Bandshell, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY. I anxiously await your reply, from behind the big sycamore.
Thanking you for your consideration,
Elliott Christ
Chairman & CEO, Elliott Christ Productions
* * *
So I embellished a coupla facts. What can I say - pity sells! Plus, as unbelievable as it is, claiming to have your own production company is a real feather in your cap.
Brooklyn 2007
Brooklyn 2007
*Me-Publican is a registered trademark of Elliott J. Christ on a Crutch, Incorporated, and all of its wholly owned subsidiaries and properties. Not affiliated with any political parties, aside from the tiny Me-Publican Party, which ran an obscure state attorney general campaign in Wyoming in 2000 and folded soon afterwards.
Friday, November 23, 2007
MILK SEX WITH PENGUINS!!!!!
Now that I've got your attention with that baffling and shocking headline (first impressions are very important), hello and welcome to my first blog - made, coincidentally, with the help of My First Blog(TM), a product Sony put out for the 0-3 market.
So who am I and what am I doing here on the Intertubes? Well, as the title to this blog suggests, my name is Elliott J. Christ. The J stands for James and Christ rhymes with pissed. The picture on the left shows you what I look like from the side, in a yellow shirt and with my eyes closed. I'm a senior at NYU's Gallatin School and live in Brooklyn with my girlfriend Meg, though at the moment I'm broadcasting from my parents' home in Pennsylvania. I play music - you can listen and/or download it on myspace.com/elliottchrist - and do a bunch of dramatic writing and filmmaking in my college work.
As for this blog... I find myself coming up with crazy shit and writing it down on various random objects - bar napkins, ATM reciepts, neighboring subway riders, etc - and so to serve the joint duties of centralizing my writing, perfecting my writing style, and sharing it with whoever's willing to listen, I impulsively decided to start Elliott J. Christ on a Crutch, established About Five Minutes Ago.
So what will you find on this blog? Sure, you got yer disembodied ramblings of a creep with nothing better to do at the moment, but you'd get that on any blog. That goes with the territory. What this blog will specialize in is, admittedly, a bit foggy at the moment, so I put a sort of vague preamble/mission statement thingy above, just below the title.
So who am I and what am I doing here on the Intertubes? Well, as the title to this blog suggests, my name is Elliott J. Christ. The J stands for James and Christ rhymes with pissed. The picture on the left shows you what I look like from the side, in a yellow shirt and with my eyes closed. I'm a senior at NYU's Gallatin School and live in Brooklyn with my girlfriend Meg, though at the moment I'm broadcasting from my parents' home in Pennsylvania. I play music - you can listen and/or download it on myspace.com/elliottchrist - and do a bunch of dramatic writing and filmmaking in my college work. As for this blog... I find myself coming up with crazy shit and writing it down on various random objects - bar napkins, ATM reciepts, neighboring subway riders, etc - and so to serve the joint duties of centralizing my writing, perfecting my writing style, and sharing it with whoever's willing to listen, I impulsively decided to start Elliott J. Christ on a Crutch, established About Five Minutes Ago.
So what will you find on this blog? Sure, you got yer disembodied ramblings of a creep with nothing better to do at the moment, but you'd get that on any blog. That goes with the territory. What this blog will specialize in is, admittedly, a bit foggy at the moment, so I put a sort of vague preamble/mission statement thingy above, just below the title.
So what you can expect ranges from full-on essays to series of disconnected one-line thoughts to songs to pictures to songs to videos to sewing patterns to carpeting samples. And other things to be decided. So, for now, enjoy this blog filler and see you soon!
Douglassville 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)