evanevanevan

Eugene O'Neill consistently came up with the loveliest titles of any playwright I can think of. 

• All God's Chillun Got Wings
• Lazarus Laughed
• Strange Interlude
• Mourning Becomes Electra
• Ah, Wilderness!
• The Iceman Cometh
• Long Day's Journey Into Night
• A Moon for the Misbegotten

 

Paul Simon has written some of the loveliest first lines of songs of any songwriter I can think of. The rapid-fire complete-sentence sing-speak of his Graceland album is particularly notable. Here are all the opening lines from that album:

• It was a slow day and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road. There was a bright light, a shattering of shop windows. The bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.
• The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar.
• She looked me over and I guess she thought I was all right - all right in a sort of a limited way for an off-night.
• I was having this discussion in a taxi heading downtown, rearranging my position on this friend of mine who had a little bit of a breakdown. I said, "Breakdowns come and breakdowns go. So what are you going to do about it? That’s what I’d like to know."
• She’s a rich girl, she don’t try to hide it - diamonds on the soles of her shoes. He’s a poor boy, empty as a pocket. Empty as a pocket with nothing to lose.
• A man walks down the street, he says, "Why am I soft in the middle now? Why am I soft in the middle? The rest of my life is so hard."
• Joseph’s face was black as night; the pale yellow moon shown in his eyes. His path was marked by the stars in the Southern Hemisphere and he walked his days under African skies.
• Homeless, homeless, moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake.
• Fat Charlie the Archangel sloped into the room. He said, "I have no opinion about this and I have no opinion about that."
• A long time ago, yeah, before you was born, dude, when I was still single and life was great, I held this job as a traveling salesman that kept me moving from state to state.
• Over the mountain, down in the valley, lives a former talk-show host. Everybody knows his name. He says, "There's no doubt about it -
  It was the myth of fingerprints. I've seen them all and, man, they're all the same."

I think there was a point in my life where I dreamed of being a stop-motion animator. I love how the results seem to be either entirely charming, or entirely creepy, with little in between. I'll let you decide which category this early Jolly Green Giant animation falls under.

Also, apparently there was a new Wallace & Gromit short released last year that I missed. Through most of grade school, I would wake up to the sound of this W&G alarm clock. The best part of talking alarm clocks is those brief moments where the sounds just appear as disembodied voices in your dream before you finally wake up.

[via drawn!]

My friend had a fever, but now feels a little better. Some late '60s soft rock should cool it down all the way.

Here's Keith with his most famous song, 1967's "98.6." Out-of-print of course, but hey! I just found out his third album The Adventures of Keith from 1969 was rereleased last fall! I have a half-birthday coming up, you know...

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I am feeling a little like Uncle Billy this morning.

The phone just rang at work. It was my boss's boss. The caller ID simply said PRESIDENT.

What a day.

John Ford's Steamboat 'Round the Bend, starring the inimitable Will Rogers, screens January 22 at 7 p.m. in the Thursday night Americanarama! series I programmed at Doc Films.

The Heavy Boxes - Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush cover) from The Heavy Boxes on Vimeo.

The most popular cover that Melanie and I have done at the Ukulele Cabaret, at least according to YouTube views and anecdotal evidence of friends-of-friends from faraway lands like Cambridge, MA and New Haven, CT having discovered it independently.

And for reference, the orig.

I always wonder what the kegerating, bags-playing South Side bros who live beneath me think when they see me walking down the stairs carrying a laundry hamper and wearing Peter Frampton t-shirts with tight neon pink women's jeans.

Back in my K-12 days, I would get myself through the tedious school weeks by finding any minor thing to look forward to and focusing on that, no matter how uninteresting it was. "We're watching part 3 of the *Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton Taming of the Shrew in English on Thursday? YESSSSS!" As life as a working office professional surprisingly has much in common with life as a high school student, I've started to employ similar strategies to prevent myself from going all brainsick.

Here are some recent things that have given me an alarming amount of happiness:

• I discovered that, because construction on the new police station a few blocks from my house is complete, the southbound 32nd street bus stop on Halsted is back, meaning I no longer have to walk all the way from 31st street to get home.
• I could never find a recycling bin for pop cans at the Potbelly Sandwich Works closest to my work (y'know, the one two blocks away as opposed to the one three blocks away). I just found that they have one by the trashcans near the counter.
• School is not in session yet at the college I work at, though the offices are open. This means that the second floor of my building, which is mostly classrooms, is empty. I am enjoying using the second floor bathrooms, which are nicer than my more local ones anyway, in total privacy.

Yes, this is the life I've always dreamed of. Can't wait to see how many trackbacks I get for this particularly riveting post.

* If Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were still a celebrity power couple today, would they be referred to by the press as "Lizard"?

from Ms. Buck's 2nd grade

Once there was a bush that looked like a dog. Then one day there was a boy. His name was Zack. He saw the bush. Then he called his friends. So they came. He said do you see what I see? They said, yes. He said do you see a bush that looks like a dog? They said, yes. Then they went home.