A few years ago, I created a Pandora station, mixing Washington DC go go artists with New Orleans funk bands — close musical cousins to be sure. The first name I typed in to start the station was Chuck Brown.
Last Friday, the creator of Treme and The Wire brought the genres together in a much more impressive way.
Coincidentally, this week saw the passing of Brown. Rest in peace, and thanks for the tunes (RIPATFTT).
Yeah, I missed our music edition last week. Busy morning, Friday. (But of course, you know these are written and post dated earlier in the week.)
First of all, here’s Florence and the Machine, as promised.
My second selection this week is inspired again by the conversation about music on Mad Men. This week, the news was about the show paying $250,000 to license The Beatles’s “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It worked great in the episode, although I think “Eleanor Rigby” from the same album would have been better. Aside from being a better tune by a long way, think about the lyrics:
Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice
In the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dreamWaits at the window, wearing the face
That she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
Does any of that sound like any characters on AMC that you’ve run into?
Here’s where I reverse direction on you. No Beatles for you this morning. The tweets about Mad Men just got me thinking about shows that did a good job on their music.
There was a show on HBO called How to Make It in America, which got no buzz, and probably wasn’t watched much. It was a good show — not a great one — but the shining star was whichever producer whose job is was to pick out music. Week after week, they pulled music that matched the show and was awesome. I’ve burned Shazam bandwidth like I did when that show aired.
Here’s the theme from that show, which I really dig.
In the past month, we’ve been to the French Quarter Festival, the Baton Rouge Blues Festival/Earth Day (briefly), Lafayette’s Festival International, and in the only paying appearance, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Have some questions about who to see live? Theskinnyonbenny family can give you a couple of clues.
At Jazz Fest last week, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny came up with the idea for the Jazz Fest Julep: buy a mint-flavored sno-ball, add smuggled in whiskey. It’s actually pretty good. Not as good as a real mint julep, but a long, long bit better than the canned Miller Lite that you can buy at the tents.
This is the closest thing I could get to a smile before the recital started.
This Sunday, Vanya had his first violin recital. I didn’t make a video, because I thought he might look up, see the camera, and quit playing in order to stare me down. He was nervous, and to be honest, I thought that he wouldn’t play that well, but I’m happy to report that he nailed it.
I wasn’t going to post about it at all, but it just dawned on me that I should have talked him into enhancing his wardrobe by one piece (although you can see that he did look great).
Friday, the heavily trafficked parts of our floors got a good, industrial type of cleaning. And despite the fact that the cleaning was timed just before two days where rain soaked the pecan tree pollen outside the back door (along with the two dogs laying in the wet pollen), they still look very nice.
I noticed that without any real discussion or plan, both of the adults here have made a footwear change in the house. I think it’s more a mental sacrifice to the floor gods rather than anything that makes a marked difference, but it has happened.
Twenty-five years ago this week, U2′s Joshua Tree album hit #1 on the US charts. To celebrate, I listened to the album from the first low rumbling of “Where the Streets Have No Name” to the kind of weird, Beatle-esque ending of “Mothers of the Disappeared” straight through, for the 1367th time. There aren’t many albums that are in my regular rotation after so many years, but I’ve never gotten tired of The Joshua Tree
The album’s opening is arguably one of the best ever recorded. To this day, when I get a new speaker, piece of stereo equipment, car, or pair of headphones, the first test listen is to “Where the Streets Have No Name.” The song us ushered in with a low rumble that will be background noise in most settings, but can be floor to jaw rattling bass if played properly. Then, the quick high notes of the guitar get added, letting you hear whether your new setup will play them crisply, or whether the sounds sort of bleed into a poppy mess (like they do in my kitchen, unfortunately).
What happens if you take crisp linen sheets, throw it out in a hailstorm, whack it with sticks made of rhino poo, and sprinkle that with awesomeness powder?
That quesiton is as magnificent and as this video, and it makes almost as much sense. You’ll want to turn it off at 30 seconds, but if you give it a full minute, you’ll stick around for the whole thing.
I just can’t seem to bring myself to watch this week’s episode of The Killing. I haven’t decided to make the step of “firing” it (which is when I delete the TIVO subscription for it to auto-record), but it’s definitely on paid leave.
I wasn’t one of the viewers that was very upset with the fact that they didn’t solve the murder on the finale to season one. In fact, I stubbornly continued to think that despite the forged evidence, they had the right guy. But of course, they didn’t. We had to set up a whole season of tail-chasing so that we can finally find out who the murderer is at the end of the second season.
And that’s the jist of the problem with this show. Two seasons is too long to solve one crime. Especially since it’s a run of the mill murder that every other show would have knocked out in an hour, with time left to spare for witty banter and a clueless lieutenant who spends his time demanding that his star detectives turn in their gun and badge.
