


My prediction for 2008, well … I have many, but just for the sport of celebrity gawking I’ll throw in this prediction.:
I predict Clinton will win the presidency and immediately win a hefty boob job. She'll then dye her hair red and sport a hip cyber-dominatrix uniform while cracking a whip madly with bill is on all fours on a leash in a pink muzzle by her side cranking Warm Leatherette by Grace Jones from a giant 80's boombox.on his back at her second State Of The Union Address.























This is part one in a series that will run over the next few days (up to and including New Years Day) featuring predictions for 2008 by folks somehow connected with Amoeba Music - staff, owners, and AMOEBLOGGERS (including The Bay Area Crew, Whitmore, Gomez Comes Alive!, and Eric Brightwell) plus other individuals who are either fans of the AMOEBLOG (such as DJ ALF) or have been featured in some way in past AMOEBLOGs such as hip-hop author/journalist Michael A. Gonzales (interviewed months back in a report about the book "Bronx Biannual")
I predict that the biggest criminals in the history of humankind, literally having stolen the entire contents of the US Treasury several times over in the last decade, not to mention all the lives ruined or lost along the way, will continue their thieving virtually unabated in 2008.
The legendary saint, Cab Calloway, brought into existence on Christmas, was never off the cob, he was the heppest cat, the gasser on the scene, and scribe to the Dictionary of Hepology, not just any book of lingo like some hincty gate-mouth might cop to, emphatically no! This man’s a poet! Hey, Calloway was solid, a ready cat with serious chops, never capped, I mean never capped. Cabell Calloway III licks hit all the armstrongs every time with those "hi-de-hi's," and "ho-de ho's, singing in that blip beat key, swinging overcoats growling some hip and hot gammin’ grooves. Be it a gutbucket blues, the ready racket on the main kick or just some clambake where he’s got this cat riffing on the doghouse - hitting all the basso notes, cool Gabriel wigging on a boogie-woogie and some Jack on skins mugging heavy, Cab always crept out like the shadow, stylish threads togged to the bricks, walking hand made, custom to the thread mezz ground grippers … on each arm, a fine righteous queen he dug the last black, each dicty dutchess fresh off the dreamers and lily whites.
At one point Cab was collaring 200 g’s a year, that’s one foxy stack of fins. Platter gravy coming on like a test pilot, cuts like "Minnie the Moocher", “Reefer Man” and "St. James Infirmary Blues" were everywhere man, chicks breakin’ it up, dropping a nickel or a dime note just to latch onto the hippest cat who could send the coolest riff riding high. Cab the man was the man; kids come again to the Cotton Club in the Apple, rug cutters Trucking, Pecking, or bugging to the Susie-Q, never no fraughty issue
here. That’s the Bible baby! Cab and the cats digging a mess, one riff after another, and every hot killer jam taking off, that combo was always bustin’ conk, breaking up the joint like gangbusters. Zazu-zazu-zazu-zay! No room here for icky squares who can't collar the jive. The jitterbuggers at the Cotton Club always had a hummer of a ball. Yeah! Whipped up! Jumpin’ and mitt pounding till the chimes say its way past early bright. Ow!
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. -- Edward S. Herman





1965, which is self titled and beautiful. It's a melancholy collection of songs, but it's one of my favorite records. Frank's voice is strong and deep. I feel like it brings a lot of emotion to the songs he sings. I like the fact also that the songs sound a little faraway, like the equipment they were recorded on was old and on the brink of death. Oh yeah, and it was produced with said eloquence by Paul Simon-- yeah, the Paul Simon.
Although he was American, Frank was thick in the scene of musicians in London in the mid 60s, and that's also where Paul Simon happened to be. Frank was also friends with Sandy Denny, even dated her for a while, Bert Jansch, who covered "Blues Run the Game," Al Stewart and more. Nick Drake also covered several of his songs and Roy Harper is said to have written a song about him.
To the left and down below are some of the pieces by Banksy. Immediately above and below are two of the pieces by Ron English. All of these pieces along with many others were posted on the website SantasGhetto which, note, in the days before posting this blog, had just been been "closed" but may be open again. Meantime check out both Ron English's Popaganda site where on the first page is a segment titled "This Christmas in Bethlehem" and also Banksy's main website.























We can all only wish that we will maintain the same sense of humor that an elderly Oregon man did right up to the time of his death two months ago.
Legendary jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, whose influential career spanned seven decades, died at his home outside Toronto, Canada on Sunday as a result of kidney failure. He was 82. 




When he wasn’t drinking in pubs and shooting billiards, the greatest Scotsman who ever lived, David Hume, took apart human reasoning, piece by piece. Of particular relevance to the holiday season, in his essay, "Of Miracles," he critiqued one the foundational chestnuts of the Christian tradition. In order for something to be a miracle, it must be supernatural. If it's truly supernatural, then it's beyond natural laws. If it's beyond natural laws, then it's a violation of anything we humans have the capability of understanding or reasoning about -- is, in other words, beyond rationality. A Christianity without miracles isn't much of a religion, since all of it's basic beliefs become, at best, metaphors for natural phenomena (virgin birth, resurrection, et al. would be just strange ways of talking about more pedestrian subjects that we all know occur under natural laws). Thus, Christianity isn't rational. At best, it's nonrational (as opposed to merely irrational), the belief being what's called fideistic, which is the act of accepting a proposition (like 'there is a god') without sufficient evidence, or, really, any evidence at all, because of the supposed value in faith itself. Many Christians don't like this approach, but it's hard to see any other viable alternative. Of those who bite the bullet and continue to believe, the most famous are:
Blaise Pascal, who argued that one should believe in a god because if there is a god, the possible reward for being right outweighs the possible punishment for being wrong and you don't get jackshit if you're right about there not being one.
Today, December 25th, means different things to different people. To many, including myself, it will now forever be the anniversary of the passing of one of music's greatest artist's ever: James Brown aka The Godfather of Soul, aka The Hardest Working Man in Show Business. Exactly one year ago today, Dec 25 2006, James Brown died at age 73 from congestive heart failure resulting from complications of pneumonia. And that shocking news, which spread fast and kept getting retold over that whole holiday week last year, put a damper on the festivities for many of us. 













Ali G is dead! The always amazingly entertaining over-the-top junglist comic character and star of HBO's Da Ali G Show and one of several characters created by British comic genius Sacha Baron Cohen, has been killed off by its creator who simultaneously killed off his even better known character/alter-ego Borat Sagdiyev.
In the meantime Baron Cohen has been spending more and more of his time on his acting career. He plays the singing barber Signor Adolfo Pirelli in Tim Burton's just opened Sweeny Todd (starring Johnny Depp) and in last year's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby he played Will Ferrell's arch rival the French Formula 1 speed demon Jean Girard. Additionally he guest-starred in the finale of the fifth season Curb Your Enthusiasm. And more importantly, in perhaps the most challenging part as an actor, he plays the role of Abbie Hoffman in the upcoming biopic on the sixties satirist being directed by Steven Spielberg.





over, it could be.
Veterans Sounding Like New
Best of the Re-Issues










pain! The woman who plays her, Marion Cotillard, truly becomes Edith and is likely to garner an Oscar nomination for her acting skills. I liked how the film flashes between Edith's life at all different stages and ages-- it's not a linear narrative and that makes it all the more compelling. In rapid succession we see both what Edith becomes and why she became that way, where she has come from.
From there Edith's life takes off in many different directions and she eventually became the singer we have all enjoyed. She's got such a dramatic and intense personality and it bleeds right into her performances! Before watching this film I really had no idea about her back story, other than (of course) that she was French and called "The Sparrow." Her life was full of roughness and not much love, except when she was on stage performing. The film does a good job of showing how Edith becomes addicted to many things, but especially to performing on stage. It's the one place she can feel flawless. Her life shifts quickly and often between the highest highs and the lowest lows. It's both compelling and painful to watch.






4. earth - hibernaculum

Lorne Green’s greatest claim to fame is starring in the long running western Bonanza, playing the role of the family patriarch Ben Cartwright and being the first man most people ever saw in color on television. But Green’s oddest credit is that he had a number one single in the middle of the English Invasion in 1964: his talking ballad “Ringo”, (which ironically is not about the Beatle, but a Western gunslinger: Johnny Ringo).
This 7 inch record, “Must be Santa,” is his contribution to the subgenre of “annoying kids singing Christmas songs”, (of which I have somehow become a leading collector!?!), featuring some fine shrill warbling of the Jimmy Joyce Children’s Choir. Oddly enough the flip side, “One Solitary Life”, is the polar opposite; a morose, bleak, 2000 year old tale of loneliness, social deprivation and the ultimate execution of a doomed unnamed man (hint, hint) which is probably a more telling song of Christmas than we’d like to acknowledge. Loren Green really plays the fate card
well. Then again, years before Bonanza, Lorne Green was known to his fellow Canadian citizens as "The Voice of Doom", a nickname he earned as a radio announcer for CBC radio from 1939 to 1942, where his distinctive baritone painted the grim news of World War II in deep somber tones. Listening to such a desolate voice, especially on a Christmas record, is just a plain and simple holiday cheer killer … that miserable tingling in your soul, its not unlike that vacant stare when you’re trying to find parking at the Glendale Galleria the weekend before Christmas, and you have an exhausted, yet frantic, raging, sugar-doped child in the back seat screaming that he wants to see Santa -NOW!- meanwhile babbling on a badly deteriorating cell phone connection is your employer going on about something trivial and asinine, and while looking at that pink parking ticket still stuck under the windshield wiper blades from the last failed attempt at shopping, you rear-end a new Lexus ...





Celebrities, actors, politicians, actually any one with an ounce of fame and without an ounce of shame seem to always want to get into the glamorous record business. That is as true today as it has been for many, many a decade. And one of the simplest ways to back into a recording career is to release a Christmas record, either novelty or a heartfelt, weepy ditty. But I have to say it’s very odd when a cultural icon steps into these murky waters.
When Cary Grant recorded “Christmas Lullaby” in 1967 it was just a year after he retired from the movie industry, leaving as one of the most popular and respected actors of all time. Obviously, Grant learned a few things from his occasional, and unintentionally amusing, stabs at singing on screen. Check-out his performance as the Mock Turtle in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland, or his attempt with a ballad in Kiss and Make Up, because in 1967 Grant mostly recites “Christmas Lullaby” in that perfectly invented accent of his. He gently whispers to his
sleeping daughter the joys she’ll find on Christmas morning, about the time Grant promises that angels will always be there to watch over and bless her he breaks into song … well sort of … I guess it was easier for the former Archie Leach to invent the actor we know as Cary Grant then it is for Cary Grant to invent a singer. But who cares, it’s still Cary Grant! Like Audrey Hepburn’s line in Charade whenshe asks and purrs, "Do you know what's wrong with you? Nothing."
