Life during right now
But anyway, that's not important and is a bit of an aside, which is ironic insofar as this whole post is an aside of sorts. I spent the evening over at my aunt's--my grandmother is in town, and I almost didn't get to see her (story not worth getting into)--but tonight I was able to have dinner with them and we had a great (and long) conversation about assorted subjects. Including politics and religion, with no fighting or loss of tempers by anyone, which is unsurprising but also wonderful.
So I don't really have time for a real blog entry, not one about politics or religion or grammar or much of anything else. Oh, and as a further aside, I wouldn't have time for an utter asstard like Vox Day even if I hadn't had an enjoyable dinner and conversation with family that took up the entire evening. (Can anyone guess whose blog I've found especially irritating this week? Wow! However did you know?) What I do have time for is a Talking Heads video.
A little free association here: I thought of the Talking Heads because "Take Me To The River" shuffled up on the iPod on the drive home (live version, 1978, utterly awesome). So when I got home I searched YouTube for "Talking Heads" and this came up. Actually, "Girlfriend Is Better" came up first and was almost your evening video, but it didn't quite fit, even as a random video apropos of nothing at all. But part of the conversation tonight was about World War II, and hey: "Life During Wartime," that has a tangential synchronicity of some sort, eh? No? Well humor me. This is from the film Stop Making Sense, which I haven't seen in probably two decades but seeing it again makes me think there's a case for this being Jonathan Demme's best film. Seriously. Yeah, I liked Silence Of The Lambs just fine, but that's some good-looking concert footage in this clip. I'd also forgotten just how fucking limber a geek David Byrne is: the fucker looks like he's made out of water. And while all the instruments sound great (love you, Tina W.), the keys solos by Bernie Worrell (of P-Funk; intro and first solo) and Jerry Harrison (outro solo) are especially delectable; dig it.
Less talking, more heads:
Enjoy!
Comments
Side note: I worked on the Pretenders video for "My Baby". Long horrible day in the pouring rain and flooding and lots of not fun. Bernie Worrell spent the day drinking and was barely in shape to sit up straight when it came time for his closeups.
Otherwise, really cool guy!
So, I forced myself to get back to work on "No Crying in the War Room", and there I am, 3 paragraphs in, and what do I type?
already.
And you know what? It's the right fucking word. It is. The language police can just suck it.
That's the kind of story about Worrell that if it were almost anyone else it wouldn't be cool, but when it's about Bernie Worrell it's somehow sort of awesome even if it shouldn't be. Sort of like when I saw Shane MacGowan and the Popes in Chapel Hill twelve or thirteen years ago--it was kind of pathetic, the way he stumbled about and almost killed his bassist and crudely tried to pick a fight with the whole audience, and yet we all would have been sort of disappointed if he'd been up there sober.
* * *
The obvious problem with the language police is that even when they're right (they frequently aren't), they leave no room for linguistic evolution. One imagines some 17th century grammar nazi harranguing The Bard:
Grammar Nazi: "You can't say that! It's ugly and it's not even a word!"
Shakespeare: "Your eye. It's round. Like a ball. Ergo, it's an eye-ball, you jackass."
Grammar Nazi: "Fine. I'm telling everybody you're Francis Bacon."
(Charles Dodgson, of course, did it entirely on purpose; he had a running bet with an ex-girlfriend--he broke up with her when she turned sixteen, but they stayed friends--that he could trigger an epileptic seizure in a grammar nazi and it would be frabjulous, so he spent many a brillig just making up nutty words to screw with their heads.)
The sentence in question was:
"Addie had already told Paul three times..."
"Addie had all ready told Paul three times..."
The second doesn't mean anything, much less what I mean it to say.
I once spent 45 minutes sitting in a director's chair next to Kieth Richards. On the roof of a 60 story building. Could. Not. Understand. One. Single. Word. Except 'mate'. That pops into his speech constantly.
Yet, still, a very cool interlude!
Wonder how he feels about that one?
I kid. I think "already" has "better" bona fides--"better" being in quotes because I think "alright" has perfectly okay bona fides on its own despite some lexicographers saying it's considered "substandard usage."