Amoeblog

scattered to the winds

or meeting monsieur 100,000 volts, stealing oranges & the art of blood doping

Scattered … That’s where I am these days. Completely to the wind all over the west coast.

If I’m not in the middle of packing up some 250 boxes of household items, records, and books, and moving from an island in the Puget Sound back to my native LA, I ‘m sitting in a van doing a small tour back up the coast to the northwest. (Of course, first I welcomed the movers to LA, found a change of clothes, found some musical gear, bid a big hello to all my newly-arrived-to-LA crap, then said goodbye to my wife and son and hit the 5 freeway north in a van with six other band members. It’s hardly a coincidence my life is so scattered. “Can I discharge myself now, please, sir?”

Side note (about the 250, maybe even 300 boxes):  there wasn’t really a  problem with our last house, the rooms were great, yard was huge, but  the very large basement looked kind of sad and a little desperate until I filled it with crap … oh how the basement purred once it was full. So 1,100 miles and a semi-truck filled with 11,000 pounds of personal possessions later …

Truthfully, yet not exactly, the biggest excuse for not writing this week about my nearly, yet not necessarily, favorite subject (7 inch 45’s--I had promised something for the good people at Amoeba at least a week ago):  cable was finally installed in our new house and just in time for the Tour de France.

For me, July is inevitably about my birthday, BBQ’ed sausages on the 4th (just meat--none of this mango/pesto/tofu stuff, save those ingredients for a smoothie) and bicycle racing in France. My money for the 2007 Tour was on Alexandre Vinokourov. He would have been my choice to win the Tour last year but his old team, Astana-Würth, was ripped to shreds after five of its riders were implicated in the “Operación Puerto” doping case and scandal, leaving Vinokourov with only three teammates and for the most part a team without a pot to piss in (pun intended). Last year Vinokourov was never accused or implicated in the doping scandal, however as of this morning all that has changed. On Tuesday Alexandre Vinokourov tested positive for a banned blood transfusion after winning last Saturday’s time trial, prompting him and his team Astana to pull out of the Tour de France. I’m broken hearted once again. “So it ain’t so Vino.”

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Posted by Whitmore on July 26, 2007 at 01:50pm | Post a Comment

(Dans quelle Job feint pour savoir le français.)

My cat is driving me crazy.

So anyway, about French pop music. A lot of you hipsters know and love Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg and, though technically not French - we’ll not poils fendus – Josephine Baker. But the newness of discovery is spoilt when you realize that all your hipster friends have the same “obscure” French records you do and are just as prepared to profess their love of them over Jack & Cokes at whatever red-wallpapered hole-in-the-wall bar y’all frequent.

You want an upper hand. You want to show your dear, dear friends you’re a little better than them. And you want to sleep with one of them, but they don’t know it and you can’t tell them because, for one, it would wreak havoc with a couple of your friendships, and two, in your heart of hearts you know that they would never really love you back. Not really.

My cat seems to think that everything in this house is a scratching post except his scratching post.

So anyway, about French pop music. I’m no expert, but I’ve been around, and can offer a few new voices to enjoy that, though well-known in France, aren’t quite as obvious a choice stateside.

A particularly glamorous option, and one that lends itself well to barroom conversation (i.e.: showing off) is that blonde bombshell, Suzy Solidor.

She opened a Parisian nightclub in the early 1930’s, Boite de Nuit, which became all the rage. She held the [questionably factual] title of “most painted woman in the world”, with portraits being realized by some dude named Picasso, and the most famous by Tamara de Lempicka...



See? You knew the painting, but you assumed the woman in it was just another cabaret-cruising, syphillus-spreading harlot that took a break from swilling back absinthe to get her portrait painted, when in reality she was a successful businesswoman and popular chanteuse.

Posted by Job O Brother on May 10, 2007 at 11:17am | Comments (2)