(Roughly) Daily

Even Walt Whitman might have quibbled (“what about Tom Petty for Florida?”, he might have asked…  ZZ Top for Texas?); still, it’s cool to be reminded that every corner of the Union is tuneful…

click (and again) on the image above– or here– to enlarge

(from The Houston Press, via Breakfast Links)

As we crank it up to 11, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that “The Wail from Wales” (aka “The Voice” and “Tiger”) became Sir Tom Jones.  His benefactress, Queen Elizabeth II, was a 38-year-old mother of four when Jones burst onto the scene in 1965.

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From Iri5, on Flickr, “Ghost in the Machine“…

In this series I showcase a number of portraits of musicians made out of recycled cassette tape with original cassette. Also included are portraits made from old film and reels. The idea comes from a philosopher’s (Ryle) description of how your spirit lives in your body. I imagine we are all, like cassettes, thoughts wrapped up in awkward packaging. : )

As we refrain from hitting rewind, we might might wish a happy birthday to John Charles Walsham Reith, 1st Baron Reith, KT, GCVO, GBE, CB, TD, PC, the first Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation; he was born on this date in 1889.

Reith oversaw the establishment of the BBC, building it to avoid the extremities of the systems he saw growing in the United States to his West and in the Soviet union to his East.  The principles he encouraged, which have come to be know as “Reithianism” include an equal consideration of all viewpoints, probity, universality and a commitment to public service.

It was a measure of his seriousness (and of his proper upbringing) that he required all radio news readers broadcasting from the dinner hour on to wear black tie though they could not, of course, be seen– to dress otherwise would be disrespectful both to the other performers on the air (also in evening dress) and to the audiences into whose homes the voices were going.

The Director General (source)

Q: How do you get a drummer off of your front porch?

A: Pay for the pizza.

In a recent interview, Mick Jagger (who studied, one might remember, at the London School of Economics) observed that the financial lot of a recording artist has been pretty dodgy since the beginning of the 20th century.  As the BBC reports:

“When the Stones started out they didn’t make any money out of records because record companies didn’t pay you,” he said. “Nobody got paid. I always wonder if Frank Sinatra got paid.

“Your royalty was so low. If you sold a million records you got a million pennies. It was all very nice, but not what you imagined you were going to get.”

However things changed as musicians became more adept at controlling their creations.

This came at about the time the Stones hit what many see as their peak, which included the 1972 release of the critically acclaimed Exile on Main Street.

Later the boom in music sales through the development of the compact disc bolstered the earnings of those on lucrative royalty deals.

“There was a small period from 1970 to 1997 where people did get paid and they got paid very handsomely,” Sir Mick said.  “They did make money but now that period’s done. If you look at the history of recorded music from, say, 1900 to now, there was that period where artists did very well but the rest of the time they didn’t.”

So how does a musician fare these days?  According to a recap in The Root…  well, You Can’t Always Get What You Want:

Read the whole sad story at The Root.

As we reconsider taking out a loan to pay for that additional floor tom, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 that Sun Records released the first single by Elvis Presley, “That’s All Right (Mama)”/”Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

The tracks were covers that clued early listeners to the influences that Presley would marry with such power as he rose to royalty: “That’s All Right” is a blues song by Arthur “Big Boy” Cruddup, while “Blue Moon of Kentucky” is a bluegrass ballad by Bill Monroe.

But that stardom was still in the distance; while Presley’s renditions become instant hits in Memphis, hometown of both Elvis and Sun, the 45 received mixed reviews in the rest of what would become Presley’s kingdom.

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From the always-amusing 11 Points (“Because Top Ten Lists Are For Cowards”), “11 Amazing Fake Harry Potter Books Written In China“…

From Harry Potter and the Leopard Walk-Up-To Dragon (cover above)…

…the author took the text of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and replaced the character names with names from the Harry Potter universe. Except for Gandalf — he remains and joins forces with the Potter crew. Here’s a passage, full on [SIC] in advance:

“There was a hobbit, who didn’t even know how to return home. He lived in a hole in the ground, and didn’t know where he came from or where he was going to. He even didn’t know why he had become a hobbit. This was Hogwartz School of Witchcraft and Wizardry 5th year apprentice Harry Potter.”

…through Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Harry Potter…

I couldn’t find a translation of this book (or a picture of its cover) but the title just kills me — smashing together two completely unrelated, but popular, Western book series to produce (I’m guessing) a non-sequitur mess. It would be like the bootleggers making a movie called “Avatar: The Hangover” or a TV show called “Laverne and Shirley and Jon and Kate”.

… to Harry Potter and Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters…

This is an interesting literary move — they just carbon copied the plot of the first real “Harry Potter” book… but moved the voice to Harry’s first-person perspective. That’s some deep “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” stuff right there.

An excerpt:

“This was a secret I had cherished in my heart for seven days. It scratched my heart and made it itch, and I decided not to tell anyone of it. But when I saw Hedwig, my owl, jumping outside my window, I knew it was the call from Hogwarts for me.
…
I would ride on my favorite flying broom, together with Hedwig and my magic wand, go-go-go, night clouds in the urban sky would cover my trails, and the meteor you saw in the sky was my traipsing manteau.”

The other eight Harrys, along with some absolutely stunning cover art– including the jacket for Harry Potter and Beaker and Burn, onto which Harry welcomes (for no explicable reason) Flick, the star of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life– at  “11 Amazing Fake Harry Potter Books Written In China.”

Readers might note that cultural appropriation of this sort has long (and storied) precedent.  Jim Fallows quotes a wonderful passage from “”Wild Bird Hickcock and His Friends,”  an essay by James Thurber– a fan of French pulp-novel versions of American Westerns:

There were, in my lost and lamented collection, a hundred other fine things, which I have forgotten, but there is one that will forever remain with me. It occurred in a book in which, as I remember it, Billy the Kid, alias Billy the Boy, was the central figure. At any rate, two strangers had turned up in a small Western town and their actions had aroused the suspicions of a group of respectable citizens, who forthwith called on the sheriff to complain about the newcomers. The sheriff listened gravely for a while, got up and buckled on his gun belt, and said, “Alors, je vais demander ses cartes d’identité!” There are few things, in any literature, that have ever given me a greater thrill than coming across that line.

As we realize that we too are free to mash up, say, Dostoyevsky, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 that Bill Haley & His Comets released “Rock Around the Clock”, the first rock and roll record to reach number one on the Billboard charts.

Bill Haley and a couple of Comets

From PR Gnus, an illustration of what one can do with the digital equivalent of scissors and some tape:  NPR News, remixed:

They’re all amusing, but one might start with, say, #90…  (TotH to our friends at Laughing Squid)

As we choose our thank-you gifts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that the first true Heavy Metal rock album appeared– the eponymously-titled Black Sabbath.  (The band– which introduced the world to Ozzy Osbourne– had originally been called Earth, but changed it’s name to avoid confusion with another band playing under that name; they chose “Black Sabbath” in homage to a Boris Karloff horror film.)

“the worst of the counterculture on a plastic platter”
- Robert Christgau, Village Voice

Your correspondent is off to realms currently under a communications-inhibiting blanket of snow and ice.  Thus these missives may be sporadic for the next week or so… with apologies in advance for any interruptions in service, he notes that readers will have curling (and the rest of the Olympics) to amuse them during any such interstice.