Brenda Lee

Brenda Lee - 1961

Brenda Lee used to figure heavily in the young feeder's impure thoughts. I've tried to analyze her voice; it never seemed to match her age. It has a breathy skip to it that you seldom hear in a young girl. A good example of this vocal feature can be heard in this YouTube video clip of "All Alone am I".

The Wikipedia entry on Brenda claims that her "popularity faded in the late 1960s as her voice matured". I would put it differently, maybe her voice 'changed', but I thought Brenda's voice was mature when she was a teenager.

Brenda Lee is still performing. She's scheduled to be in Wichita August 14th. I don't think I'll go. I don't want to risk damaging the naughty image of her I conjured up as a boy listening to Sweet Nothings.

Recapitulation all over again

Matador Practice

The old feeder is throwing out almost everything at the feedlot. I did decide to box up photographs, slides and negatives. In the process I came upon the photo above. It is one of the first pictures I ever took, maybe the first one that wasn't hopelessly blurry.

I used to like to watch wannabe bull fighters practice their passes. These cats were full of bravado and self-confidence; they made an impression on a 9 year old yo. They had coaches that charged them with a sort of wheel-barrow contraption that had bull horns mounted on the front. With this it was possible to simulate the movements that are peculiar to individual bulls.
---
Maybe I'll post a few more old pictures.

Worried about "Swine Flu"?

Defoe - a better Great Plague read than Pepys

The old feeder's family gives him a raft of shit for living a secluded, hermit-like life. Besides the fact that I've always preferred solitude to whatever the opposite is said to be, I avoid people partly to avoid the diseases they carry. Having cirrhosis of the liver, almost any nasty virus could finish me off.

There is certainly no shortage of swine flu alarmists. Oddly enough, most of them seem to one worlders who figure that only increased statism, big government health care, or UN rule can save us. There are others who disagree and advise the peasantry to relax and go to a movie. The old feeder sides against the alarmists, more because of their totalitarian bent than their science. I'm still not planning to hang out in crowded, virus and bacteria infested places.

One of my favorite books is Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. My old copy, bought when paperback classics could be had for sixty cents, is pictured above. I read it about once every two years or whenever the news talk turns to epidemics. Its a novel; Defoe was just a kid when the bubonic plague came to London in 1665. But it is nearly a first hand account by a great writer.

Samuel Pepys, the London diarist of the day, covers the Great Plague (and everything else that he saw) but his plague coverage is not as captivating to read as Defoe. Defoe's details can be shocking, disgusting, poignant and disconcerting. People avoided crowds in those days, even though they didn't understand how the plague was spread. I suppose it was a safe bet that some of the people you might have seen on the street in the London of 1665 had fleas. Fleas are great jumpers.

If you want pure plague entertainment, I suggest Edgar Allan Poe's very short story, The Masque of the Red Death. You can read it here and read about it here.
---
Join the Disease of the Month Club. Pay your dues a year in advance and get a free broken bone.

Resisting National Socialism

Members of the White Rose, Munich 1942 (click pic)

Presented without comment: the Wikipedia article on German resistance to Hitler's National Socialist administration.

Gratuitous Rilke

Some Like it Dark

Du Dunkelheit, aus der ich stamme, ich liebe dich mehr als die Flamme, welche die Welt begrenzt, indem sie glänzt für irgend einen Kreis, aus dem heraus kein Wesen von ihr weiß. Aber die Dunkelheit hält alles an sich: Gestalten und Flammen, Tiere und mich, wie sie's errafft, Menschen und Mächte - Und es kann sein: eine große Kraft rührt sich in meiner Nachbarschaft. Ich glaube an Nächte.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Bad Law?

Igor Stravinsky's Mug Shot

Anything you read about pianist, composer and conductor Igor Stravinsky must mention his arrest for tweaking the US National Anthem. Wiki: "On April 15, 1940, Igor Stravinsky's unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner led to his arrest by the Boston police for violating a federal law that prohibited the reharmonization of the National Anthem."

There seems to be no record of Igor doing time in a federal penitentiary, so the music police must have let him off with a warning. The law must have been repealed. Somehow, I find myself wishing the current Congress would spend more time deliberating such weighty matters. Some silly music laws would be more palatable than the results of their current efforts to reharmonize our Constitution to suit national socialist thought.
---
The old feeder never much liked Stravinsky's stuff. I admit that, as a kid, I liked the adaptation of The Rite of Spring that Walt Disney used in Fantasia. This might be because it wasn't a real ballet, or because Stravinsky himself called it "execrable", only changing his tune after seeing the color of Walt's money.
---
Shouldn't Roseanne Barr have been severely punished for this?

Aquí

Octavio Paz

Back at the Feedlot

The Old Feeder's Situation - Click for More

The old feeder is back at the feedlot. A few family health crises have kept me navigating hospital halls laid out like rabbit warrens, sleeping on couches and eating more institutional cafeteria food than I like. All this has done little to improve the confusing, rifted mess that my personal life has become.

Blogging remains less than attractive. Sorting out my relentlessly confusing affairs of the heart and the necessary and pressing disposition of my pack rat accumulation of worldly goods is daunting. So far all I have done is a mountain of laundry. Today I'll try to thwart the distraction of bittersweet sentiment and nagging regret long enough to wash a sink full of dishes.

When unrestrained, I can be nauseatingly dramatic, no?

To those feeder readers who were kind enough to be concerned, my relative is out of the hospital (if not the woods) and I'm back at home. I'll be OK, one way or the other. Thanks for the kindness.