My Marks & Spencer lunch on our last day in Brum. I could eat a £1 M&S takeaway sandwich every workday lunch of my life and be alright with it. I thought about Belle & Sebastian the whole time.
Media announcements: Still Englanding but I'll take a minute away from grey skies, puddings and train schedules to direct you to my presence in the funny papers in January.
Country Roads: My buddy Clarke and I get lost on out way to the venerable Rainbow Inn in Pierre Part and become Don Rich fans.
Offbeat: I profile the king of the Louisiana music business, Johnny Palazzotto, Just after press time, Jim Messina (of Loggins and ...) popped in and dropped a little more praise on Johnny.
Cheers to you all, dear readers! Let's rip 2011 a new one!
The view of Warwick Castle from atop Warwick Castle.
The only way to view attractions like these are through the lenses of themselves. They are real and unreal, deconstructed and reconstituted for the end of making-funner, which is why a lot of people eschew these places but when you think of it, is among the noblest of goals. We chased peacocks, saw more mannequins, shot arrows, got scared out of the haunted dungeon, walked ramparts and scaled towers - the view above is from atop Guy's Tower - and watched a guy get shot out of a cannon. It was great fun.
Warwick the town is lovely as well. I got my tea on at a place founded by Thomas Oken who donated much of the land around the place; that's him at the bottom seated at that table next to us. Best ham and cheese sandwich and best Earl Grey of my life.
Afterwards we hit up an English toy store. A boy approached his dad and said, "Father, I wonder if you might consider buying some scenery for my model railway." They had some cool train shit in there I'll readily admit, but c'mon.
Round two at the castle: Maya won a coconut on some medieval game. We were a little pout out they were not firing the trebuchet today.
Alphonso, the strongest and bravest man in the world capped the afternoon off in a capital manner.
Upon departure, the fog plunged the castle into the realm of memory. I love vacation.
Clifford's Tower in York. William the Conqueror gloomily stares back from one of those windows at you, perhaps from his toilet.
York is British tourism heaven - at once Roman, Viking, Gothic, train-enthused, a little rainy, full up with quaintness colliding with crass commerce; old York reminds one a little of the French Quarter in that regard. We hit the big sites like York Minster, the National Railway Museum, York Castle Museum and maybe most germane to the usual posting habits of this blog, fish and chips and a pint of Mallinson#s Porker Porter from the Lamb and the Lion's selection of cask ales, just inside the old city walls.
We saw this animatronic, below, finishing off the ride at the Jorvic Viking Center in style, doing exactly what it looks like he's doing, Flo over at the Viking center;s archeology annex showing off a petrified sample of that Viking handiwork. They kinda have a thing about poo over here.
We have been in a blur of gorgeous Victorian train stations and quaint cabs in and about magical old York. Last night we got back and dig into a kebab fry up and today's adventures will include bacon sanries from the pub down the street, another train to Warwick castle (and possibly more pooping robots) and the loose promise of high tea. Cheers!
Oh, and here is the sausage butty had at the York Castle gift shop. Let it be noted that even gift shop cafe food is worth noting here and that the universal understanding that British food is categorically horrible holds no water with me.
Our hosts Allison and Pete, Rob and Nicola were responsible for the most magical and elaborate Christmas dinner and festivities ever. You don't even know so I'll attempt to explain.
Here is a partial inventory of the games played and activities engaged in throughout the meal:
The nut game (in the lounge before the meal): a card game that involves walnuts in a pile on the floor, a kind of a musical chairs kind of thing. Daughter Nicola faked out dad Peter at the end and won for the first time ever.
Articulate, one of the presents.
Popping the Christmas cracker with hands crossed around the table.
Reading the jokes inside the cracker along with the trivia questions.
Playing the vegetable game: you hide your teeth behind your lips and everyone picks a vegetable. I was broccoli and Grandma Cynthia was parsnip and you call around the table "parsnip parsnip calling tomato tomato" and then tomato calls aubergine and so on until someone bares their teeth and is out. Cynthia going "parsnip parsnip" was both hilarious and infused with gravitas.
Each Christmas cracker comes with a paper crown and a numbered, tuned whistle and then there is a card for how to play carols, which we did. Like a lot of them. To completion. The English see things through.
The fruit game: see the vegetable game except fruit. Cynthia proved just as powerful in the role of "melon".
Epic round of Charades in the other lounge. Mom Allison was tasked with miming "Quantum of Solace" and pulled it through. Brother Ian did a good job with "Mama Mia". Cynthia pulled off "American Psycho".
Squeak Piggy Squeak: this involved a blindfolded person pointing around the room and when you are pointed to, you make a squeak and the blinfoldee guesses who it was.
We started to play Coffeepot but finally the night finally played itself out. There was some variation of Squeak Piggy Squeak called "Pussy" where you sit on people's laps that never played out.
This was all amid courses of sorbet, venison in some kind of sauce, cheese and biscuits, Christmas pudding and more coffee and whiskeys and even more drinks. I just had a bacon roll and a flat white coffee from the pub around the corner from sister-in-law Sheila's flat in Birmingham and have popped into the Tesco. It should be noted that while playing the vegetable/fruit game, with teeth tucked behind lips, we all sound like the Queen.
I'm committed to spending my vacation in 'airplane mode' as it were but there is so much to love about Olde England. Euston Station is a rabbit warren of a place that I'm half convinced I dreamed, having been up for infinite hours of travel by the time we made it out of there. London was a whirl and we just went sledding out the countryside in Rugby, like where rugby was likely invented. I arrived this morning to Sir Paul McCartney declaring that he was simply having a wonderful Christmastime and though I'm more of a John/George type, I have to agree with the old lady-man bastard. Already had a bacon sarnie this morning and I understand cheese and biscuits are being laid out as I type. Father Christmas was duly informed of the wee Beatlemaniac's manias and set her up with a shirt a hat, a bag, an etc.
Maya got very perturbed at a neighborhood potluck this weekend when some rowdy boy tossed a lighter into this fire. I heard her behind a slammed door exclaim to her compatriot girls, "That was so stupid!"
"In another world we shall understand it all," he said lightly.
"In another world! Ah, I don't like that other world! I don't like it," he said, letting his scared eyes rest on his brother's eyes. "Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one's own and other people's, would be a good thing, and yet I'm afraid of death, awfully afraid of death." He shuddered. "But do drink something. Would you like some champagne? Or shall we go somewhere? Let's go to the Gypsies! Do you know I have got so fond of the Gypsies and Russian songs."
His speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly from one subject to another. Konstantin with the help of Masha persuaded him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.
and shortly after
He took up his book again. "Very good, electricity and heat are the same thing; but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the other in the equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well, then what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt instinctively….
Anna Karenina is pretty good, yep. I laid the rest of the Beatles catalog - post Rubber Soul - on the wee Beatlemaniac and we are both drawn to Magical Mystery Tour, an album I never really think about when I Think Beatles. We talked this morning how weird "Only a Northern Song" is, how it all sounds "out of tune" in her words. She said she didn't like "Fool on the Hill." I said, " I think it's about Jesus, you know, how he was on the cross on the hi-" and she cut me off with my arms outstretched. "I know. I don't like to think about all that because I don't believe in it."
Her atheism is nothing new to us, nor is it particularly tied to ours - she acquired it naturally, on the street from her friends, where all the formative things are found. I wasn't sure whether her quick dismissal was because "I don't want it clouding my thinking" or "I'm choosing not to fool with such foolishness. I'll take my fairy tales as attractive teenage wizards, thank you very much." Either way, I approve. And I approve should she make an about face somewhere down the line and fall into Jesus' open arms. She's gonna fall into somebody's.
RIP Captain Beefheart. It was heartwarming (for some selfish reason) to find so much outpouring on the medias social about his passing. He was the good, weird America. Check him out phoning it in on the Hot Line for American Bandstand, circa 1966. Check out what I want America to look and sound like.
David Toub has some great advice with what to listen to today, so I'm following. Somewhere I have a story about visiting a shut-in in Los Angeles, a fellow music nerd that I didn't realize was a shut-in until I'd flown out there, playing Charlemagne Palestine for me. I was getting fed up with him, it was the third of a four-day visit and I was trapped in the house without a car finally reaching my saturation with listening to crazy records, so when Palestine's Strumming went on with deafening volume - it is just two notes repeated in succession forever - I'd had enough.
I walked out side with my last three cigarettes thinking what did I get myself into? How naive am I? Then I heard the record radiate from the house; not blare from it like party music but more like gamma radiation penetrating the walls out into the street, causing mutation in anyone out there except this was a quiet neighborhood in Torrance, CA where no one was ever on the street, so I was this radiation's sole benefactor. Strumming is all overtones, much like my visit was and I realized it was all this guy was capable of. He had no melody, just sound bouncing off the walls hopefully turning into something. I let my cigarette drop in his yard, the yard he claimed he hadn't stepped in for six years, only leaving the house in the car from inside the garage, and opened the door to a deluge of overtone. The universe was being titrated through this record and hit me full force.
Here is it with the composer realizing it for carillon. Thanks to the ever-informative Robert Gable at aworks for pointing me to this.
My lunch yesterday at the Chimes: charbroiled catfish poboy with a side of red beans & rice. You can probably find this exact order embedded in my DNA.
It is the time for year-ending and I feel less defintive and more fickle than usual. I still think Titus is on top, but really the best album I've heard for the entire year that lasted from yesterday through today is the s/t debut from the Soft Pack. Jeez Louise, it's good...
The Soft Pack, "Parasites"
But then it is tapping all my right nostalgia buttons and that is terrible criteria by which to judge the music of Now, so where does that leave me? Back in spring, I'd've given a spare kidney to the new Drive-By Truckers album and the other night I couldn't think what it was called. I just dismissed Spon half-heartedly in a Facebook volley and here I am minutes later all over it. It's tougher than it looks, being an arbiter of taste and all.
Also, I've never given the Walkmen the time of day simply because I was such a fan of Jonathan Fire*Eater from whose demise they sprang and I never got over it.
Jonathan Fire*Eater, "When Prince Was a Kid"
But I'll do it, have no fear. Bullet points at the ready.
