Donald, Gerald, and Robert

I learned a lot of things during my recent trip to Minneapolis, but the most important was how to solve logic puzzles. The fact that I can now tackle a reasonably difficult puzzle is pretty striking, since I used to be hopeless at them.

So when I ran across this classic I just HAD to try and solve it, and I'm proud to say it only took me...errr, fifteen minutes. That might not be so hot but I'M pretty pleased with myself.

"DONALD + GERALD = ROBERT" is a mathematical cryptogram. Each of the ten letters stands for one of the digits from 0 to 9. None of the digits stand for more than one letter. As a starter, the letter "D" stands for "5".

For those of you (like me) who hate puzzles that require trial and error to solve, don't worry; this one is unambiguous.

Ye Olde Novelty Songs: "Slow Poke" by Arthur Godfrey

I listen to a lot of old time radio so I'm bound to hear a lot of weird mid-century novelty songs. Occasionally I get a yen to share a particularly strange one.

So here's Arthur Godfrey singing "Slow Poke," which was apparently a big hit for him in the '50s. This was actually recorded sometime during the late '60s or early '70s -- hence the distinctive reverb -- and I think the guy singing with him was named "Cy." He was probably one of the ex-"Little Godfreys."

"Slow Poke" was actually a pretty popular song -- read about it here -- and it was covered by anybody and everybody. But nobody could sing a weird song like Arthur Godfrey, probably because he was such a creepy guy to begin with.

To future visitors: the link to the song will probably break in a month or two.

I'd Buy Anything By...Marc Almond

I'm not a huge fan of Soft Cell, but Marc Almond's solo work is stunning...most of the time. Thanks to "Tainted Love" and his rodent-on-ecstacy looks, Almond's songwriting ability has been largely overlooked. Folks, he doesn't just SING those songs, he WRITES them.

I'd buy anything by Marc Almond -- when I can FIND his music, that is. I've missed out on the last few albums due to their rarity and their high prices. But I'll still pick up anything I see, especially the singles (to find all those tragic B-sides about aging, drugged-up drag queens that he loves to write).

First, here he is with Gene Pitney performing "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart" live. This is to prove that he can really sing, and that -- even though Pitney sounds pretty awful -- they can harmonize and give you goosebumps.

This song breaks my heart whenever I hear it.



Now, to prove that he can WRITE a song as well, here's another sad one: "Waifs and Strays," off his album "Enchanted" (which contains some of his best work).



I don't know how I first discovered Marc Almond -- if you grew up in the '80s he was lodged somewhere in your subconscious no matter what -- but I think I started to ADMIRE him when I heard "What Makes a Man a Man" in the Wigstock film, and his album "Open All Night" turned admiration to LOVE. His collborations with Annie Hogan in the short-lived "Marc and the Mambas" turned love into unconditional respect. So here's to you, Mr. Almond.

Shuffle On the MuffyPod

Here's the shuffle from yesterday, June 27'07:

1. Super Charger Heaven (Adults Only Mix) -- White Zombie. Great music to work to. You can't understand what he's saying, so Rob Zombie's lyrics don't magically end up in my documentation.
2. Bedroom Shrine -- Marc Almond. More on Marc soon.
3. Music for My Mother -- Funkadelic. Stoned man does harmonica solo, and it's sublime.
4. Twilight Zone -- Golden Earring.
5. Put Me On Top -- Aimee Mann.
6. Kuu Kuu -- Nits. There's a lot of Nits on my iPod.
7. Playing Canasta -- Kate Bush. One of her lesser early piano demos.
8. Blood Money -- Nitzer Ebb.
9. No Purpose No Design -- Meat Beat Manifesto.
10. Flashdance...What a Feeling -- Irene Cara. Often the happy songs are the most welcome!
    

Stepmother

After finishing "Moby Dick" I needed a quick and easy book to relax with. I would never recommend Robert Coover's novels as "quick and easy" reads, but his novella-sized "Stepmother" (illustrated by Michael Kupperman) can be finished in a day, with very little pain done to the reader. Unless it hurts you to read about women who are married to the hedgehog king.

First off, what a gorgeous book. McSweeney's is a publisher who REALLY CARES about presentation. It looks like a sturdy collection of children's fairytales, complete with a hard fabric cover and a recessed picture. It's not a book you want to prop up a sofa with, that's for sure.

Secondly, fairytales are a shoe-in for Coover. Disregarding his books that are overt fairytales to begin with ("Briar Rose," "Pinnochio in Venice"), most of his characters are already subverted archetypes who repeat stereotypical behaviours from beginning to end. "Ghost Town" had its doomed schoolmarm, its cowboy, and even its sentient train. "The Babysitter," his best-known story, features compressed variations on all the archetypal babysitters, all their boyfriends, all the parents, and all their children. Oh yeah, and a suffocating girdle full of butter.

In "Stepmother," these elements aren't disguised...they're the entire point. The small cast of characters are distilled from Brother's Grimm: The Old Soldier, The Reaper, The Stepmother, The Ogress (Stepmother's name for the "holy female" character who tells victims to accept their suffering as grace), the king and his three princes.

What's more, the characters are doomed to repeat their small set of character traits. The Old Soldier, always discharged with nothing but a crust of bread, has an arsenal of magic items that he uses frivolously. The Stepmother must help the unfortunate and punish the fortunate -- which is difficult, since by helping the unfortunates she turns them into people she must subsequently punish. There are always three princes: the older two must betray the youngest, who -- of course -- is a simpleton.

In typical Coover fashion, the protagonist -- Stepmother -- refuses to accept the constraints of her world and is tantilized by ways to break the pattern...ways that end up being part of the pattern itself. If we can take one thing from Robert Coover's writing, I think it's the idea that escaping the system is simply another part of the system, and the only people who are truly at peace are those who just relax and "let it happen." His characters are never more at pain than when they discover that yet another door leads back to the same old courtyard.

I've already read far too many fairytale deconstructions, but Coover approaches his characters so naturally -- and with such humour in every piece of predestined, cliche'd dialogue -- that I loved "Stepmother" from beginning to end. It's particularly fun when it's nasty, revealing the undercurrents that Brother's Grimm never spelled out explicitly:

She had a stepsister who was a snotty little saint who got up our noses at every opportunity with her sanctimonious wheedling and rehearsed meekness and dead mother worship, suckered by the Ogress as she was, and so as not to strangle the simpering twit in a fit of impatient rage or mark up her irritatingly pretty little face, I would send her on impossible errands just to get her out from underfoot. So one day I sent her to pick strawberries in the snow and she came back, not only wth strawberries but also coughing up gold pieces whenever she spoke. At home of course the smug little vixen clammed up, wouldn't burp a farthing, just gazed upon us all with a fat-faced beatific smile.

Lady Pepperell Sheets

I'm becoming intimate with the weekly advertisers for The New Yorker, particularly the ones that tell stories.

It wasn't unusual at the time for each weekly advert to be different, and for the ad to be a thinly disguised "story" about trendy subjects or current events. They always ended with a product pitch. It's fun to see the copy writers contort themselves in order to bring all the elements together.

Here's a typical "story" advertisement from December 17, 1927. How do you write Lady Pepperell sheets, the Lindburgh crossing, and female pilots into a single advert? In case you were wondering, here's how THEY did it:

Nancy Lee had been brought up to fear neither God nor the Devil. Always two jumps ahead of her crowd when it came to trying something new and reckless--she was the first to get a pilot's license. Apparently no stunt was too difficult for her.

Then came the thrilling achievement of that lone youth who courageously crossed the ocean. Nancy couldn't wait to follow in his path of glory.

Up before dawn on the day of her hop-off for Europe, she started to examine her beloved plane. Imagine her surprise when she saw an infant cozily sleeping in the pilot's seat.

Golden fuzz and pink cheeks, just visible in a snowy white bundle, captivated Nancy's heart completely. But naturally she couldn't take the baby so she took for good luck the sheet in which he was wrapped--a Lady Pepperell.

And after the flight--during which she triumphantly established a flying record for women--she found that Lady Pepperells were as conducive to much-needed sleep as to world records.

The poor writer! What's with the baby? Either it's a reference of some kind to Lindburgh's flight, or it's been slipped in there for readers who think Nancy Lee should become a housewife instead of being a dare-devil pilot.

These "story" advertisements were prominent in the world of radio, where it was extremely cheap to keep the audience's attention by re-writing the brief script every week. Some companies did this exceptionally well -- I'm thinking of the "stealth" advertisements of Lever Brothers -- but others made only a minimal effort.

In the latter case are the Odgen's tobacco advertisements from 1944's "The Weird Circle." The scripted connection between the show's plot and their tobacco is always embarassing to listen to. For instance, their adaptation of Frederick Marriot's "The Werewolf" is repeatedly interrupted by this sort of thing: "Werewolves frequently appear in folk literature throughout the ages. Something else you'll frequently see is Odgen's tobacco...easy to roll, delightful to smoke."

The Coolest Dog of Pride!

This year I'm giving the game away by immediately showing you the winner of "The Coolest Dog of Pride!" That's Brutus, and there never was a cooler dog. Not in 2007, anyway.

Click the picture to see the rest of the contestants, and a few other shots from Toronto Pride.



PS: For reasons that aren't very interesting my Toronto Pride Impressions appear below the "Moby Dick" post, even though they were posted after it. So scroll down a bit if you're curious.

Finally Caught Up to Moby Dick

Being a whaler was a complex and arduous profession. Sighting, chasing, catching, and flensing a whale was another complex and arduous procedure. All the exciting and beautiful moments on the sea, the way waves and birds behave, the varied characters of Christians and cannibals...

Well, reading "Moby Dick" is a complex and arduous pursuit, and you don't even get a "lay" for finishing it -- unless you want to get laid by a bibliophile, of course. I can't possibly do this behemouth justice -- I leave that to Thinkulous, who has even made a pilgrimmage to New Bedford in honour of the book -- but I can at least tell you how I FELT about it during the beginning, middle, and end.

At the beginning of the book I was sprightly and enthusiastic, full of devil-may-care derring-do. I was prepared to read slowly and carefully. From previous experience I knew that "Moby Dick" requires commitment and concentration; if I "skimmed" I'd find myself adrift like poor Pip, watching the narrative float away, and the only review I'd finally offer would be "I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look." Which is just plain confusing.

In the middle I was getting into the swing. I'd found my sea legs. Every digression was a new revelation. Every word was essential. I loved Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. I loved their theatrical asides. I loved Tashtego's gruesome descent into the Great Heidelburgh Tun.

But somewhere around chapter 99 ("The Doubloon") my mind began to wander. The book had given up all pretence of "adventure," and had even left behind much of its naturalism, and was becoming more and more concerned with ethereal notions...and by chapter 104 ("The Fossil Whale") I found my mind wandering. Where the heck was Moby Dick? Did it matter? I could still appreciate the ideas behind Melville's digressions, but I no longer wanted them to be in this particular book.

The final chase and climax was a bit like watching a constipated person on the toilet. We know the whale is in there somewhere, but it just won't come out. It seems like Melville's pushing and pushing -- chase number one, chase number two, chase number three -- and when finally -- ah! -- the release...well, it's not a whale in the bowl, it's just a small porpoise turd.

I'm not saying I didn't like the ending. I am saying that it doesn't do justice to the lead-up or to the route we've taken to get there. And I still love the book and I think it's something special, but -- on first complete reading -- I appreciate it more for its digressions...and, strangely enough, it's the PLOT that prevented me from enjoying the digressions as much as I might have. When Melville described the whale and the ocean and the slickness of spermicetti, I was in love. When he brought us back to Ahab's insane quest, however, I wished Ahab would just GET THE HELL ON WITH IT.

PS: It turns out that I DIDN'T know how it ended after all. I thought that Ishmael was telling us the tale from the bottom of the ocean, no doubt thanks to these lines from Laurie Anderson's song "Blue Lagoon":

Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade.
But that suffers a sea change.
Into something rich and strange.
And I alone am left to tell the tale.
Call me Ishmael.

Now I realize that the bulk of those lines do NOT come from "Moby Dick." Anderson has a long obsession with the novel, and this has inspired me to go back and have another listen to her "Life on a String" album, which contains some songs inspired by the book. Songs I didn't like much the first time around.

PPS: I did see a "Moby Dick" movie adaptation about ten years ago. I remember not caring much for it, but I do recall one haunting image: Fedallah flopping back and forth in the tangled lines.

Toronto Pride Impressions

On Seeking Attention: A few years back, Annie, Victoria and I would dress up in showy outfits during Toronto Pride and march up and down Church Street on Saturday night, which was an ego stroke. Hundreds of people would take our pictures, they'd stand around and point, and guys with video cameras would stand there tell us to shout things like "Happy Pride, Puerto Rico!"

But while part of me loves to wallow in attention like a dog loves rolling in roadkill, the other part believes that this craving for attention -- and achieving it in such an easy way -- is pandering to a part of my nature that should be controlled, not encouraged. It like eating too many sweets on Hallowe'en night. It seems cheap and desperate and fleeting. So I stopped going.

But taking part in Pride to promote Pridetoberfest? That's a different story!

On New Shoes: Since I'd be wearing my "sexy dirndle" outfit, I decided -- on a whim -- to try on the only pair of shoes I owned that would match it. Both shoes fell to pieces as soon as I put them on, they were ancient and the plastic was dried and cracked. They were like mummy-shoes.

I raced out to buy replacements. I wore the new shoes around the house on Friday night, trying to break them in. Making dinner in heels, doing the laundry in heels, cleaning the catbox in heels. They didn't hurt at all! They felt great!

Walking and standing on pavement is very different.

A Resolution: We arrived in Toronto at 9am and I decided to follow through with another of my recent resolutions: to not meticulously plan EVERYTHING. The thing I didn't plan this time was to double-check Jason & Craig's address. With only two hours to get ready, I wandered in the general vicinity of their apartment without actually finding it, maybe because I was on the wrong street. Payphones are a dying breed, they now cost fifty cents a call, and they don't give you any change back. My call to Jason gave me the right address and it only cost me a dollar.

On Human Relations: Flyers, flyers, flyers. It was very sunny and we were handing out flyers. Most people were very friendly and were happy to receive the flyers. Many were genuinely interested in the event. Other people smiled and shook their heads, which was okay; I think that when somebody smiles at you, you should at least smile back, and if you don't you're a jerk.

I got an inkling of how panhandlers feel, even when they're not asking for money. Some people, as soon as they saw my flyers, looked at me in a strange way that seemed almost animalistic; they turned their heads at an angle, squinted slightly, and stared at me aggressively from the corners of their eyes when they passed. This meant "don't you DARE waste my time with another stupid flyer." It was like getting a dart from hell right into your forehead.

I also didn't want to discriminate, but with so many people approaching I needed to quickly decide who was most likely to be interested and approachable. I didn't want to assume that twinky boys would be better targets than -- for instance -- a guy who looked homeless. People in wheelchairs? Sweet old Oriental couples? The older lesbian and gay couples? Kids who appeared to be underage? Naked men? The Village People? The Human Pony?

Would a homeless man be offended if I gave him a pamphlet, or would it give him a feeling of integration, or would he just be indifferent? I decided to exclude those who were obviously homeless, on the grounds that it would be like giving tap shoes to a person with no legs. After doing this for a few hours, a homeless man walked right up to me and held out his hand. So heck, I gave him a flyer.

On Picture-Taking Tourists: Many of the Japanese girls are giving "peace" signs when they take pictures this year.

On Daytime Drag: My face fell apart at 3pm on Saturday, due to a number of factors that were all my fault. On Sunday, Jason introduced me to the joy of Ben Nye Fixing Spray, which was a huge revelation.

Still, there's simply no way to do totally convincing drag in direct sunlight. Sun dries out foundation and makes it curdle. It's difficult to strike a balance between "understated" and "overdone." Anybody who gets within three feet of you will have their illusions shattered.

Context: I have recurring anxiety nightmares about failing exams and screwing up a DJ set, but the most common -- and nightmarish -- of them all are my dreams about Being Only Half In Drag. Like, being out in public and realizing that I'm wearing men's shoes (or even just shoes that clash), or getting out on stage to perform and realizing I'm not wearing any makeup, or -- the most nightmarish of all -- being out in a sunny event with tens of thousands of people, and realizing that my face looks sort of like a wooly cottage cheese.

On Sunburn: I had a vivid and sort of pretty negative version of a dirndle halter top on my skin. No wonder I'd been getting woozy; I always feel that way when I've been out in the sun too long. I hadn't put any lotion on my shoulders, back, or chest, which was only slightly less stupid than the time I didn't put any on my feet, and had to crawl to the telephone the next day to tell my supervisor that I wouldn't be in to work, because my ankles were so swollen they could no longer flex.

On Cel Phones: During dinner, the woman at the table next to me was on her cel phone from the moment she sat down to the moment I left, which was halfway through her meal. Her five-year-old son played a game with his auntie (or nanny). The game was called "I'm Going Away Now." I can't help thinking his mom plays this game an awful lot with him, for real.

On Repetative Vision: When I shut my eyes to sleep I saw people walking towards me...face after face after face, not realistic but sort of like a crowd you'd see in a comic book. They were all walking towards me and I could see my hand and I was giving them flyers. I never saw the way the faces reacted, I just saw them aproaching, and they shifted and wobbled like a film about LSD.

Languishing

I apologize for not updating the blog much during the last few weeks. Besides a general busy-ness (I'll be in Toronto this weekend staffing the Pridetoberfest booth, and in July I'll be playing a non-speaking role in a webcast film series) and ongoing work on a complicated UPhold track ("The Road to Avondale"), I've mostly been nursing my hand.

As work gets more hectic (and involves more quick fiddling with documents), the strain on my tendonitis gets more extreme, and the less I can do outside of work. This includes typing blogs, cooking, opening windows, picking stuff up, and generally being useful.

I've found that soaking it in icewater makes a world of difference. But it's awfully hard to type when one hand is completely submerged in icewater, believe me.

Hopefully things will get back on track on Monday. And I'm sure I'll have lots of adventures to tell y'all about...