Saturday, July 6, 2013

Hurricane Category 5

The oldest pain killer
This was Cow Milk's favorite beverage. I toasted him with a 2x4.

Tupelo Honey


I've been listening to more Van Morrison than is good for me lately and while the album Astral Weeks was reportedly sung entirely by Van Morrison and an acoustic guitar and then everything else was added later by stoned genius jazz musicians, it doesn't really work as a solo acoustic set. Sure, Van Morrison could make it work but Oggy has his limitations.

Tupelo Honey is one of those songs that I've heard quite a bit and never really paid attention to it. But now that I read the words it makes no sense.

The chorus is a love poem to an angel. The first verse is kind of a vague reference to tea, which needs honey, and the narrator wants no part of it. The third verse is a liberty march anthem from Dylan's journal which is unrelated to the song but had meaning for the time it was recorded in 1971. And that's the whole song. It escalates and builds in interest but that's all Van Morrison's doing. The lyrics don't go any further. It's like he wrote a verse and a chorus that sort of made sense, then he took another verse from another song and figured it would do more harm than good to rewrite so he recorded what he had and no one really noticed. But the song itself, analyzed, sucks balls. Even the chord progression....[ Bb, dmi...Eb...Bb.  // Bb....dmi....Eb....F] is monotonous. So it's perfect for Oggy's master play list. Someone asks for something by Van Morrison, "Maybe Brown Eyed Girl"....Oggy winces...."How about Tupelo Honey?" and everyone is happy.

This is dedicated to Cow Milk Blues who texted me from an ambulance on his way to the ICU as he'd had a heart attack today. I really meant to record more songs with him, including this one, but it never came together. I feel that Cow Milk might be better off checking out entirely, making room, as Updike would say, for the fresh meat. He's worn out and maybe the next dimension will be better. He's done with this life. From now on he'll only be repeating his songs.

Help me

Here's a comment I made on my climate sounding board. It's been 102-110 around here in Texas and so hot the lizards are drinking their own blood. Of course this is Texas and it's hot here so everyone will say that it's no proof the climate of the whole planet is getting worse. And there will always be a sunny day somewhere on earth so some asshole on Fox News will cast doubts on the scientific evidence. They are the flat earth society of modern culture, distracting the masses with pantyhose ads and celebrity cellulite gossip...side boob, liposuction of the soul. It's enough to make my heart throb in desperation and sadness. The topic today was mitigation or adaptation. Do we concentrate on recycling aluminum cans (for 20 years I did this and ended up in Texas where nothing is recycled except polluted wastewater for hydrofracturing. haha.) or do we build sea walls (which will do tons of good for wildfires) but might save Miami's porn and luxury yacht industry? This was my response:

Why Risky Business Forecasted The Future

"It was great the way her mind worked. No guilt, no doubts, no fear. None of my specialties. Just the shameless pursuit of immediate gratification. What a capitalist." - Joel Goodsen

I watched Risky Business (1983) last night instead of attending the annual whore bazaar at the local donkey show festival. Call me a prude. I grew up with Risky Business and thought it was a fantasy but the events of the last 30! years have me reconsidering that assessment. See, Joel Goodsen (Borrowing Hawthorne's "Goodman Brown" as a source name) wasn't a fantasy...the high school senior who fucks a hooker, damages his father's car, flunks two midterms, ruins his GPA, fucks up an interview with a Princeton admissions suit, and then eventually has to buy all his property back from a pimp but ultimately gets the hooker (whose heart is closer to a real hooker than most) and his reputation is slightly tarnished with his parents but who overlook everything because he does get admitted to Princeton Business School (on the strength of his hookers blowing the interviewer at the brothel (Joel's house). Fantasy? Pure Titillating Nonsense?  No. IT WAS COMPLETELY TRUE and I'm going to tell you why.

Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.