Musical Interlude...Of Sorts

Love Tom Waits. Love this song. Love this spoken word piece. Love these videos. Both from Mule Variations.

Re: "What's He Building In There?" I am, by all accounts, a tad...eccentric. Friends who know me and this album often quote this piece whenever they drive by my apartment. They think they're being funny.

Little do they know...

Bubba Badinage

Ages ago, well, 1994 or thereabouts, I couldn't resist buying the anthology The King Is Dead--Tales of Elvis Postmortem. The idea was simple: "{e}ach entry must include Elvis Presley in some way, shape, or form, and Elvis must be dead."


The results were mixed, as one might expect, but it's still worth seeking out a copy even though it's long out-of-print (Brother Wayne got into the act with "Elviscera," wherein "{a} gaggle of Gothic teens establish an Elvis sacrifice cult hoping to make the world better through murder (summary stolen from here)." That's our Wayne.

Anyway, one of the stories was a delightful little read by Joe R. Lansdale entitled "Bubba Ho-Tep" which at the time I thought would make a great little movie. Eight years later and lo and behold! A film version did emerge with none other than the great Bruce Campbell as Elvis (and Ossie Davis as John F. Kennedy, which takes some explaining but works).

Naturally, I bought the DVD as soon as it hit the shelves. Quick review: the GREATEST movie pitting Elvis against an ancient Egyptian mummy ever!*

I also liked the soundtrack--a lot--but Amazon.com no longer carried it and the retailers who did wanted moon money for the damned thing ($176.76 for a new copy? I don't care if it is signed by the director, bite me).

Still, I wanted it. Yeah, I could play the DVD or fire up YouTube and listen to all my favorite passages, but that's so awkward (plus I don't have the fun of wandering the streets of Richmond with my mp3 player blasting "The King's Highway" at full volume while I stave off an imaginary horde of marauding mummies. Yes, I have an active imagination).

Then I thought of checking the official website. There it was, $19.95 + s&h, signed and everything, and now it is mine.

Take a listen:

Amazing what one can do by varying a simple musical theme!

Thank you, Don Coscarelli, thank you, Brian Tyler. You've made me very happy this weekend.


*This, by the way, is similar to my capsule review of From Dusk Till Dawn, "the greatest Mexican Aztec vampire movie with George Clooney and Quentin Tarentino ever made!"

Uncle Bill vs. Billy Shakespeare--Guess Who Wins

Some of you may know I have a... thing... for William S. Burroughs.

No, not like that. Behave yourselves, you rassin' frassin' mundane noodles. He was just such a... strange bird... that I find him weirdly fascinating. Forget about his books for the time being; like many people I'd rather read about Burroughs than read Burroughs (Naked Lunch made my brain hurt, then again, maybe Naked Lunch was supposed to make my brain hurt).

I mean, here's a man who, as John Waters once said, became "the first person who was famous for things you were supposed to hide": drug addiction, sodomy, pederasty, self-mutilation, wife-killing...

Oh yeah, the wife-killing thing--in 1951 Burroughs, ever the gun enthusiast, shot and killed Joan Vollmer during a drunken game of "William Tell." Accidentally. Perhaps.

Which is why I find so many pictures of Uncle Bill a bit... unnerving:

Note the flagrant disregard for Cooper's (Golden) Safety Rule #III

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago over at Kick Him, Honey writer and firearms fan Benjamin Whitmer posted this little video which I found amusing as hell:

"He's dead, man!"

I Want My Mummy!

A couple of years ago I was babbling on (and on) about those things that scared me as a kid and I thought I did a pretty thorough job dredging up all the stuff that kept me awake, wide-eyed, and sweating under the covers at night.

The Horrors of It All recently sparked a repressed memory (and bless this guy's heart, he's kindly provided scans of the interior pages here and here):

Dell Movie Classic #12-537-211, Sept/Nov 1962

Now, if this was merely a matter of musty meandering mummies I wouldn't even mention it; monsters going around doing their monster business was why I read these things in the first place. But there's this one scene...

Oh, man! Suffocating. Alone. In the dark. Took me weeks to get over that. Then I saw Universal's version of The Mummy on Shock Theater one scary Saturday afternoon--fast forward to 0:41--and I was never the same again.

Yeah, I don't think I'll be reading Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear any time soon.

Cactus Watch 2010--It Bloomed!

Echinopsis huascha

Cactus Watch 2010

It's getting bigger!

'While Strolling In the Park One Day..."

"...All in the merry month of May,
I was taken by surprise..."
--The Fountain in the Park by Ed Haley

So there I was, wandering through Byrd Park near The Round House (photo, not mine) when I stumble across this:

THIS FOUNTAIN
IS ERECTED BY THE WOMANS
CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION
OF RICHMOND CITY AND HENRICO COUNTY
AND THEIR FRIENDS IN MEMORY OF THE
CRUSADERS OF HILLSBORO, OHIO WHO
WENT OUT DECEMBER 19, 1873 WITH THE
WEAPONS OF PRAYER AND FAITH IN GOD
TO OVERTHROW THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC;

AND ALSO IN MEMORY OF
FRANCIS E. WILLARD
ORGANIZER OF THE WOMAN'S
CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION.

THE GRAVEST BATTLE THAT EVER WAS FOUGHT!
SHALL I TELL YOU WHERE AND WHEN?
ON THE MAPS OF THE WORLD YOU WILL FIND IT NOT;
IT WAS FOUGHT BY THE MOTHERS OF MEN.

And I'm thinking, "OMG, I've lived here for 19 years, passed through the park dozens of times, and never noticed this before? WTF?"

Here's what's amusing to me: (1) the water's been turned off and has probably been off for many years, and (2) there's a local AA group which holds a Sunday morning meeting in the Round House (many recovering alcoholics are heavy, heavy smokers and the WCTU was definitely anti-tobacco as well as anti-alcohol).

Here's more from the Historical Marker Database. and a page about the WCTU drinking fountains: "At the 1874 organizing convention of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the members were urged to erect drinking fountains in their towns so that men could get a drink of water without entering saloons and staying for stronger drinks. Often the drinking fountains that were erected offered a place for horses to drink, another place for dogs, and of course, a place for humans to drink."