I love the story here: In the late ’70s a musician from Akron and his girlfriend puts out an album that quickly goes out of print but gets continuously sampled over the years, becoming a white whale for collectors everywhere. Meanwhile, he and his band just keep putting out music. Music that’s really up my alley, at least in my adult life.
More than that though, I dig the obvious Northeast Ohio roots…
I was digging into my Rust Belt roots a bit and stumbled onto this absolute treasure trove!
The Gamut : A Journal of Ideas and Information was published from 1980 to 1992 by Cleveland State University in the fall, winter, and spring/summer of each year. It contains articles and creative works by writers and artists of Northern Ohio about topics of interest to readers of this region.
GAMUT was not on my radar in those days, even though it and my life co-existed in the 216 at the same time. But if something this eclectic came out these days, I’d be all over it. It’s topics really do run the–well, you know. There’s stuff on history, art, law, politics, urban infrastructure, psychology. Whole issues devoted to special topics like books and publishing, UFOs, even science-fiction analysis and reviews — this material, even from a historical perspective, has me thrilled!
Much like Mac Miller, trumpeter jaimie branch was a musician whose name I’d heard but whose music I never got around to listening to until after her passing a little over a year ago.
Luckily, there seems to be a lot of stuff out there to go through. Keep flying, jaimie!
I hear the background music of wah-wah guitars and Moog synths, see the washed out video quality, and I’m taken back in time to those grainy films shown on the best 8mm projectors my Catholic grade school could buy two decades prior, when John XXIII was the Pope.
Anyway, there was always a disclaimer that came after a brief teaser at the start of each episode…
This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture. The producer’s purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones to the mysteries we will examine.
Of course, there are tons of shows in this vein these days, mostly on cable channels that purport to be all about History and Discovery. Only, they don’t seem to bother with the disclaimers much, at least not matter-of-fact disclaimers. When they do, they’re delivered with a wink and a nod. There’s something about it that seems, strangely, like innocence lost.
There was a time when skipping Weeknotes for three weeks in a row would’ve been a source of shame and self-abnegation. I’m over that. Mostly. Life happens, yes — fam, dayjob, a couple days of feeling under the weather, not to mention general exhaustion.
I’ve been feeling like the dude in the picture in the next section.
IN THE WILD:
I saw this picking up a late lunch one day and say a very relatable dilemma. I mean, at a place that’s open 24 hours where you’re gonna have to get this done sometime (whatever this was), I guess broad daylight would work just as well as the middle of the night?
I feel you buddy, I really do.
IDIOT BOXING:
Can’t keep track of what I’ve seen on which streaming service anymore, but it’s been a month of binge-watches.
It’s been interesting watching GRIMM and BLEACH: THOUSAND-YEAR BLOOD WAR, what with all the random German getting thrown around.
I finally had a chance to check out what all the fuss about RUSSIAN DOLL was about. I get it! I mean, I find Natasha Lyonne’s work enjoyable anyway. The part where her character describes herself as a cross between Andrew Dice Clay and Merida from BRAVE. I see Sam Kinison, myself.
The highlight of my binging was DOCUMENTARY NOW. I missed it when it first came around, but when I saw the episode “Long Gone” being a take on Bruce Weber’s LET’S GET LOST, I regretted it. A send-up of CHEF’S TABLE with Jonathan Gold and David Chang doing cameos? A little Spalding Gray (-ish) thing? Where was this all my life?
Awhile back I found the complete IN SEARCH OF… series from the ’70s featuring Leonard Nimoy on DVD for five bucks that I’ve been slowly going through. More reliving my youth, I guess.
READING:
I’ve been slacking lately. By slacking, I mean “not knocking out 2-3 books in a weekend.” But like a true book addict, that didn’t stop me from adding two new sci-fi novels from friends of mine, a short story anthology, and a couple of non-fiction books. Because, why not?
NEXT EPISODE(?):
Hopefully it won’t be three more weeks, with life happening — the fam, dayjob, a couple days of feeling under the weather, general exhaustion — until the next post. But you know, all that happens when I do manage to keep this up weekly, so exactly what goes on in these fallow periods of mine? I’ve been trying to break that down and I don’t have anything close to an answer yet. Maybe I’ll have one next time.
USA Network’s Kung Fu Theater was as much of a Sunday ritual growing up as going to Mass. Weekend after blissful weekend of kung fu movies, and not all of which were The Classics, either. Probably, most of them weren’t. But one in particular stuck out to me and for nigh on 30 years I’ve been trying to find some trace of it. I’d long forgotten the title, I had no idea who starred in it, when it was made, or who made it. I just remembered the plot, in which a kung-fu master trains a bunch of reprobates for basically a suicide mission.
Googling it was pretty much useless, so I’d pretty much given up hope of ever seeing it again. And then, browsing through Prime Video at an ungodly hour the other night, I found it!!
The film is 1979’s KUNG-FU COMMANDOS aka INCREDIBLE KUNG FU MISSION. Kung-Fu Commandos does have the ring of familiarity. It was the era of G.I. Joe figures and movies like COMMANDO about, well, commandos.
It’s not every day you get to recapture a bit of your lost youth!
I had a couple of “vacation from the vacation” days but after that, this past week was all about getting back on track with daily life. I still haven’t gone through all the photos I took from Boston.
Okay, you know what? Let’s start there, then. I have just the thing, a metaphor for how I’m feeling — a little pressed.
IN THE WILD:
Yeah I feel you, buddy.
Anyway, one of the places we visited was the Salem Witch Museum, which starts off with “an immersive look into the events of 1692” using life-sized dioramas and narration that sounded like it was recorded in the late 1970s — kind of like the intro from Tales from the Darkside — to underscore the prejudice and injustice behind it all.
WRITING:
I did make a little movement on this front, though! There were a couple of calls for submissions that I noticed last week, so I put something together for one and am in the process of a new piece for another. Because, why work on the other things you have going right now, when you can just start new shit on the spot, right?
You know, I think that’s all I’ve had in me this week. Along the lines of stuff from the 1970s, maybe what I need now is to rebuild some Cognitive Salubrity…?
I’d buried this tidbit in a Weeknotes post a few weeks back and it’s been bugging me ever since. This really deserved its own space.
The Witch on Horseback Institute for Cognitive Salubrity was a short-lived new age education center and performance space founded in Trumansburg, New York in the nineteen-seventies by former employees of the Moog synthesizer company. These forgotten recordings with disgraced Ithaca experimental psychologist Noving Jumand were discovered at a library sale in Ithaca, New York in the early 2020s, and have been restored from the original LPs by the musical entity known as Witch on Horseback, named in the Institute’s honor.
“This recording has not been approved for therapeutic use,” is the disclaimer that appears at the beginning of each track. I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I should listen to it a few more times…
I pulled ESSAYS by Wallace Shawn out of the bowels of my TBR pile. Maybe it was all the times I’ve been seeing him in YOUNG SHELDON reruns lately, I dunno.
Be forewarned, a lot of these pieces were written around and about 9/11.
Shawn lays bare, in the plainest and simplest English, the stuff a lot of people think but are afraid to say out loud, let alone publish in a book.
It takes some balls to publish an interview with Noam Chomsky, but give yourself the last word. But I guess when you star in a critically acclaimed and highly referenced film about hanging out with your boy at a restaurant, you can get away with things like that.
