Now I’ve got The Lonely Goatherd as an earworm the rest of the day.
No, not this version:
That file still makes me laugh.
I don’t remember the context under which I created it, other than the screaming goat was sort of an inside joke between myself and a coworker at DISH in response to something our horrible supervisor did.
Said coworker was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a work husband, but I cut off all contact after we moved back to Phoenix and he admitted he voted for Trump in 2016. It was kind of a surprise because he was a very liberal guy.
Gawd…I don’t even remember his name at this point.
Chris is only one of two artists whom I’ve written (as in a handwritten, ink on paper) who has ever responded. For that reason alone, he remains one of my favorite Ambient/New Age artists
Grace, at 78 years old, is right up there with the rest of the divas whom we embraced and provided the soundtrack of our lives in the 1980s. We can’t lose any more of them this year.
Pussy Tourette – In Hi-Fi (1993) & Who Does She Think She Is? (1995)
Whatever happened to Pussy Tourette? An extensive internet search comes up with precious little. The most comprehensive thing I found was via grokpedia (including her real name, Mark Cliser, who, through further searching I learned is now 63 years old). Seems the last thing she released was EP1 in 2007—now only available for download via iTunes. There isn’t any physical media available for this release.
These albums prompt so many good memories of my life in SF during the 90s, including my return to The City in ’98 as I was winding my way through Oakland, just before I crossed the Bay Bridge.
I remember how scandalous the lyrics were considered at the time. Now you hear much worse on a daily basis.
The trailblazing cult classic To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar! was released in theaters on September 8, 1995. Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo star in the film that brought drag culture into mainstream Hollywood.
I’m slowly backfilling my Loscil catalog and this has become one of my favorites.
And in case you haven’t noticed, this particular player, the D-EJ915 has also become my favorite portable. The overall design and choice of materials used, the build quality and the sound all contribute to that. Yeah, it uses rechargeable gumstick batteries, but even the crappy ones made nowadays still manage to keep it happily powered for a couple days’ listening sessions. And if those run out, I have the external AA battery case to connect in an emergency. (Can your music player running out of juice really be called an emergency?)
The 915 doesn’t have a built-in display but that’s proven to be less of a liability than I initially thought. The display on the supplied inline remote [one of Sony’s worst designs IMHO] supplies all the info and frankly after living with this player for a couple months now, I think if they’d designed a built-in display on the lid it would’ve really destroyed the aesthetics.
When I first moved back to Phoenix from SF in 2003 and was staying with my Dad, I got into watching NCIS because that’s what he watched. It was fun, engaging, and justice almost always came to the bad guys (something that was sorely needed two years after the still-fresh wound of 9/11). When I moved out and got back into my own place, the apartment complex I moved into provided their own—and only their own—satellite television service at an exorbitant monthly fee. It wasn’t even connected to Cox for you to bypass. There was no other option. Nope, thanks. I’ll stick with broadcast.
So I continued with NCIS via broadcast TV.
When Sasha Alexander was unceremoniously killed off left the show in 2005 my interest started waning as I realized she was my favorite character. But I stuck with it because—even though I now had real cable available—it was fun, engaging and justice almost always came to the bad guys (something still sorely needed, hip deep into the Bush/Cheney years). And I suprisingly embraced the addition of Cote de Pablo’s Ziva charcter to replace Sasha Alexander.
When Pauly Perrette left the show and more importantly I learned the reasons why, I almost gave up on it again, but it was fun, engaging, yadda, yadda, yadda…
It was only after Cote de Pablo’s brief return to —and departure from—the series followed by Michael Weatherly leaving that my interest started waning altogether. When Mark Harmon (whom I originally discovered many years earlier via Goliath Awaits) left his role as Gibbs to go behind the camera and produce, that was pretty much the death knell for me. To be honest, I gave the replacement cast a couple seasons, but the chemistry that the original series actors had just wasn’t there. Gary Cole, Wilmer Valderrama (I still see him in his role from That 70s’s Show), and Brian Deitzen are all fine actors, but this just wasn’t the NCIS I’d grown to love. It didn’t help that the stories seemingly started to alternate between “let’s scare grandma with the dark web (or whatever boogeyman was current)” and “social cause of the week.”
And then there’re the spinoffs…NCIS: New Orleans was decent enough, but it wasn’t worth recording to watch at a later time. If we missed it, we missed it, and didn’t feel a sense of loss. And as far as the others (NCIS:Sydney immediately comes to mind) are concerned…well, don’t even get me started.
What say you? Do any of you still watch the show? Age-wise from the commercials alone it was obvious I’m was target audience, but I’ve lost interest in the entire franchise and can’t be bothered to even check in on it these days. There are so many other excellent police procedurals out there (a genre that Ben and I both love), that we don’t have time to waste on this pablum.
I couldn’t name a single song she’s done (although I’d probably recognize them if I heard them), but Chappell Roan certainly has immediately recognizable look down.
I saw this in San Francisco at a theater on Filmore Street in 1988 shortly after it was released. I’d completely forgotten about it until I ran across this clip.
Big Business came out in 1988, and the entire premise is exactly the kind of wonderfully ridiculous comedy setup that could only work this well in an 80s movie.
Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin each play TWO characters — two sets of identical twin sisters who are accidentally mixed up at birth after both sets are born at the same hospital on the same night. One pair grows up wealthy in New York City, while the other grows up in a small West Virginia town… and years later all four women end up in the SAME hotel.
So yes, Bette Midler is playing opposite Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin is playing opposite Lily Tomlin, and everybody is running around trying to figure out why strangers suddenly look exactly like them.Â
Fun fact: the movie was directed by Jim Abrahams, one of the filmmakers behind comedies like Airplane!, so the increasingly ridiculous mix-ups make a lot more sense once you know that.
And can we appreciate how much work movies like this required BEFORE modern digital effects? Scenes featuring both versions of the same actress had to be carefully staged using techniques like body doubles, split-screen photography, and precise camera setups to sell the illusion that the twins were actually standing together.
Honestly, Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin playing four women in one movie was already enough to get me.
This record is among the half dozen or so pieces of vinyl in my collection at the time that survived “the great purge” in the late 80s. I never thought it was a particularly good record, but it still held some sentimental value that caused me to keep it back then and even today I remember the afternoon I bought it—and where.
It was sometime in the fall of 1978. As is typical with Phoenix that time of year, it was balmy. The extreme heat was gone for the season but it hadn’t yet turned cold. I’d gone to Odyssey Records on the southeast corner of Camelback and 12th Street in search of something else, but this record was prominently displayed in the store’s 12-inch singles section. Naturally I’d heard it in the clubs by this point, but it hadn’t grabbed me enough to actually rush out and get a copy. It seemed that Dolly—like Rod Stewart—had been pushed in the disco direction unwittingly and it showed.
But then I saw it…the pink vinyl peeking out of the center hole of the sleeve.
I had to get it if only for that one aspect. Finding colored vinyl in the wild back in the day was a pretty rare occurrence. Would I have gotten if it were standard black vinyl?
In all honesty, probably not. This was years before 9 to 5 or Best Little Whorehouse in Texas or Fried Green Tomatoes. Naturally I knew who she was and I was familiar with many of her songs, but Dolly really hadn’t made an impact on my consciousness yet. Of course, all that changed over the next 40 years and while I considered Baby I’m Burnin’ more of a novelty than anything else at the time, it’s become one of my most treasured records.
I’d been a fan of Saint Tropez since their initial release, Je T’aime in 1977. It was sexy, slow-dancing disco, and in fact the main track from that album, Violation was the first time I’d ever slow danced with another man, David Martinez.
Belle de Jour is one of my favorite disco records from 1979 and one of only two album covers I have framed.
After I heard Belle De Jour the first time that night back in ’79, I left the club, gave up my prime parking spot and drove downtown to Circles Records. Firstly because if anyone in town had this record, it would be them, and secondly—well, they were open until midnight…
Sadly, they didn’t yet have it in stock, so I drove back to the club and was rewarded later that evening by the DJ playing the track a second time.
I did finally get a copy not too long after that and—like J’Taime—acquired a copy of its own translucent pink vinyl version via Discogs about ten years ago.
Sade has been such an integral part of the soundtrack of my life since she first burst on the scene in 1984. One of my fondest memories of listening to her music was one afternoon when I was underground, waiting on MUNI at the Van Ness Station and I was plugged in and walk-dancing along the edge of the platform while listening to Stronger Than Pride. I knew I looked ridiculous, like a scene from an as-yet unreleased iPod advert with the black figure dancing with the white headphones, but I didn’t care. I was in my happy place.
