Not been blogging much lately. Instead I’ve been amusing myself by rechristening Russian composers with the forenames of contemporary American pop acts.
Justin Shostakovich. Snoop Rachmaninoff. Outkast Mussorgsky.
Ludacris Rimsky-Korsakov.
Sometimes in ‘Use Your Illusion I’ you feel as though Slash is waiting for Axl to come down to his level and rejoin the song (e.g. Dead Horse). But on ‘Use Your Illusion II’, it’s clear that Axl and Slash are of a piece, the strained melody of each looking to the other for its redemption from the bludgeon of bar-room boogie-woogie.
n.b. Axl = Don Quijote, Slash = Sancho. But the more I think about ‘Don Quixote’, the more I think it’s about complements rather than contrasts. The pity of each fool is through the comedy of the other fool - it’s a comedy which feasts on mutual pity (which includes that of the reader): a ringing guffaw against the dead philistinism of the (and any) times - like much of ‘Appetite for Destruction’ (’It’s So Easy’; ‘Out Ta Get Me’; ‘Anything Goes’).
“Now playing: Blondie, ‘Stay Pretty’.
Driving back to base from King Solomon’s Mines today, I cranked the radio and was treated to Bon Jovi’s ‘Dead or Alive’. I really don’t think Bon Jovi get the respect they (he?) deserve. Compared to the likes of Aerosmith, who are living legends nowadays, basically thanks to a lamentable hip hop crossover song and an unfeasibly photogenic daughter, and even Mötley Crüe, for god’s sake, compared to their back catalogues, Bon Jovi’s is hidden under a hefty bushel. But “Dead or Alive”:
Me: He’s a cowboy, on a steel horse he rides. What do you think the steel horse is, Grant? A motorbike?
Grant: Yeah, what else would it be?
Me: So you don’t think it could be a robotic horse?
Grant: Uh, no.
Me: So what did he do to be wanted, dead or alive?
Grant (coming from dead to alive): Well, it’s the theme tune from ‘Young Guns’, right, which was about Billy the Kid, so it’s obvious what he did: he was Billy the Kid.
Me: Right you are. But Billy the Kid wouldn’t have owned a motorbike, would he?
Grant: No.
Me: Then what does Jon Bon Jovi mean by “a steel horse”?
Grant: How should I know? That guy must have been on crack.
Me: Unless he meant “a stolen horse”. Perhaps the real lyric is “And I steal horse, I ride!”
Grant: You must be on crack, too.
Grant: menace, what’s a lentil?
Beethoven was ‘the Bono of his day’ according to ‘classical music experts’, reports Yahoo news. But the Yahoo hack isn’t satisfied with the inanity of this comparison, and so rephrases thus: “Was Beethoven the 18th century answer to Bono?”
C20: oi, C18 - we’ve got Bono. What have you got?
C18: ho! Bono, thou sayst? Though we know naught of thy ragamuffin chaunter, let him be never so honey-tongued, nor so adept in the divine art of praising the works of heaven, by means of sweet and melodious wheedles, as to cause an honest arbiter to accord him the rival, in the production of beguiling hymns, odes and tunes of every sort, which in every way transport the mortal soul of those priviledged to listen, of our Beethoven! who, tho pompous and deaf as a post, and possessed of some unorthodox ideas concerning the proper government of society, is surely the foremost composer of illustrious and well-made musicks, of this, or any other, age!
C20: a movie dog? Are you serious?! Bono is way cooler!
My laptop carked it last week, so I arranged for an I.T. wallah to leave a replacement in my office for collection over the weekend. What I found, bulging from a never-used cabinet, was the Bruce Willis of laptops: a nails-hard mo-fucker with string-vest swagger, glistening with a lambent sheen of testosterone. Packed with its car battery-sized adaptor, and ‘Don Quixote’, it rippled the surface of my bag and ate up every ounce of my carry-on allowance.
Now I realise that there is more to my new laptop than brute might: although engendered in the physical form, its potency extends beyond the formal or the corporeal. It seems to read, and feed on, my libido, and I in turn respond to the ease with which it articulates my most primal desires. The centre of the (l)id is ensorcelled with the “Dell” rune, an unblinking chakra dominating the psychic landscape. As I write this, I feel myself awash in the gelid light not only of the screen, but of an unyielding will, a power to vanquish all my clients enemies, but which, wrongly-handled, could result in my annihilation. The Hrunting to my Beowulf, the Aegis to my Zeus.
Ranked #2 place for a taco salad in the Lower Mainland!
- sign outside Mexican eatery, Marpole, Vancouver
Travel, give me a break. You ask anyone what sort of thing they enjoy, they say ‘travel’. Bollocks, what those people enjoy is holidays. Travel in itself is just rootless anonymity, a vague sequence of slights and humiliations culminating in another vague sequence of slights and humiliations. Because ordinary people, local people, people of a locale, spit on travellers, and rightly so. Travel at its root is a Kafkaesque guffaw, a moving airport walkway forever against you, and anyway, always full of fat immobile golfers; a bland 737 crammed with those total cunts who recline their seats on one-hour flights, who by the way are not travellers, but a constituent of travel itself - an incarnation of my nemesis.
I don’t think travel broadens the mind, either. I don’t see evidence for that. People who travel come back dull and monomaniacal, rhapsodising on the glories of the place they’ve been. If they like it so much they should stay there, imbibing that Polo-flavoured ichor, absorbing enough ennui to stun a sloth, until they become so boring their voices disappear from human frequencies, and can only be heard by actuaries.
According to Webster’s Online, there are two searches per day, “across the major English-language search engines” for “pantechnicon“. I wonder who the other one was?
Also according to Webster’s, “archdeacon” is a rhyme for “pantechnicon”. I suppose it might be if you pronounced “pantechnicon” like a Mexican. Hey, there’s another rhyme!
I had an economics teacher whose stock fictional company was “Purple Pantechnicons plc”. Google hits for that: 0.
- Robust
- Eloquent
- Euphemism
- Chasten
e.g.
Grant: hey, ‘a robust review’ - is that a technical term?
me: I’m sorry?
Grant: what does it mean, ‘a robust review’? Is that a particular kind of review?
me: robust is just a word meaning strong or thorough.
Grant: oh, O.K. It’s just I haven’t come across that before.
I rest my case for Bachelors of Commerce being debarred from the accounting profession. Fuck me, the man is thirty years of age. Or,
me: they say he took early retirement, but I’m pretty sure that’s a euphemism.
Grant: a what?
me: a euphemism.
Grant: a what?
Dr Creflo A. Dollar
though born into squalor
could hear God’s inimitable voice
saying “drive a Rolls-Royce!“