A Web Quiz Would Never Lie

I was already sold anyway, but according to this, it would be wrong for me not to vote for Obama.

Pitch "Jump"

From Warmowski, this priceless Van Halen train wreck, summed up here:

So what happens when you’re Van Halen, the last song in your set list is the million-seller “Jump” with its synthesizer-keyboard opening…and the recording you’re using to play back the synth is accidentally run at 48K instead of 44.1K?

Ouch. If you're wondering what the fuss is about, you can really hear it at about the 1:50 mark, and again at 3:00. It makes Stockhausen sound like Schubert.

Fabulous "Fabrik"

I must second this Times rave for the beguiling Fabrik, which plays a bit like the Muppets doing a Nazi-era docu-fable as conceived by Ernst Lubitsch. What's not to like?

Simonized

I used to have a quick and easy answer for those who asked about my musical influences/favorites: Elvis Costello and Paul Simon. That was true for quite a number of years, essentially from high school on. I'm dating myself here, but when Graceland came out, I was a freshman in college, and its wide acclaim made me feel vindicated, as if the world was finally (re)discovering the guy whose previous five solo records (Hearts and Bones, anyone?) I'd kept close to my vest for several happily solitary years.

Though the peripatetic, over-achieving Costello has captured my attention more consistently in the years since, and my taste has skewed away from Simon's softer-edged pop inflections, I'm fascinated to learn that BAM will host three programs of Simon's music under the rubric Love in Hard Times: The Music of Paul Simon, throughout the month of April. The first will be a concert staging of The Capeman, Simon's misbegotten Broadway show of 1998, which I couldn't bring myself to see (and whose cast album I've barely spun, sorry to say, though I relish some of its deep-dish doo-wop flavors).

The other two will cover his world-music and "American" periods. Joining him in the former concert will be a trio of artists I love in their own right--Milton Nascimento, Hugh Masekela, and David Byrne--and the former will include Olu Dara, The Roches, and Brooklyn-based band Grizzly Bear.

If Simon has reached the retrospective stage of his career, in other words, he almost couldn't be doing it better.

(One weird grace note: Apparently "Visa Signature" cardholders have special "advanced access." Now where have I heard this before [scroll to bottom of post]?)

John S. Becker, S.J., 1925-2008

Fr. Becker wasn't just a beloved high school English teacher and inveterate punster. He was also, for all intents and purposes, my first journalistic editor. At the monthly high school paper The Round-Up (now in an online version), for which he served as sage advisor, I covered the school's theater department (even for shows I was working on), started a pretentious literary supplement with poems and short stories, and wrote features and editorials about faculty and students (I also "covered" Brophy's football games without bothering to attend them, which in turn led to the only time I was almost beat up for something I wrote).

As both a teacher and advisor, Fr. Becker was a gnomic, solitary figure with a squinting smile and quietly exacting standards. He once glimpsed the copy of Brideshead Revisited I toted around most of my sophomore year and declared, "I knew there was something I liked about you, Kendt." He elaborated: "That's the best novel in the English language." The best novel "in the American language," he added, was Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, which I promptly and gratefully devoured.

I cannot lay my disgraceful love of punning entirely at Fr. Becker's feet, but I would remiss in memorializing him without mentioning his most-repeated signature phrase. It was typically delivered as a deadpan reply to a query from a student along the lines of, "Would you like me to turn it in on Friday?"

Fr. Becker would say, without a trace of a wink but with a certain twinkle behind the eye: "I'd be like a firefly in the rain."

It was left to the attentive student to do a double-take and inquire what Fr. Becker meant (I knew of a few students who were too intimidated or baffled to ask, thus depriving themselves of the punchline).

The priest's reply happens to sum up how I feel now, looking back fondly on him and his idiosyncratic tutelage: "De-lighted."

UPDATE: My ever-sensitive iPod just played one of Fr. Becker's favorite songs.

Sweeney Floyd

The dim-wit barber of Mayberry.

Super Adventures

In the midst of the Tom Cruise train wreck last week, I was impressed by this fascinatingly even-handed piece by Dana Goodyear about "Chateau Scientology" on Franklin Ave. in Hollywood. As a longtime L.A. resident, I can attest to the odd magnetism of the Celebrity Centre's grounds, directly across the street from a bustling street nightlife and a fine 92-seat theater, onto which a date and I once wandered many years ago and lingered in a pictureseque gazebo before getting weirded out and skedaddling.

I also know that for years at Back Stage West, we printed innumerable ads for the getting-into-the-business seminars at Celebrity Centre, and received a fair amount of complaints that these were simply church recruiting events (which a Scientology spokesperson admits they are in Goodyear's story).

Amazingly enough given the Scientologists' reputation for litigation and reprisal, I Goodyear had experienced no repercussions--until, that is, she received a copy of the Church's magazine Celebrity at her home, though she never gave the Church her home address.

My only run-in with the Church, apart from a few phone calls to a legal rep when I wrote this story, was even odder. To promote a gig by my erstwhile rock band in the late '90s, I sent out a postcard that whimsically employed an image of L. Ron Hubbard playing a bass guitar (found on this site). I didn't identify the image as such, and its provenance was lost on most of the recipients of the postcard. But apparently someone on my mailing list worked for the Church and recognized the photo, because I promptly received a cease-and-desist letter! I promised not to use the image again, but I also saved the letter and put the lawyer on my band's mailing list. Fair play, I'd say.