Aw, hell naw. If I’d only known about Lambchop’s wonderful cover of Sisters Of Mercy’s This Corrosion before our wedding, it would totally have gone on the playlist. Don’t get me wrong, I loved ending the night dancing to Nina Simone with Alec, but words like “Gimme the ring, kissed and toll’d” would’ve been a fun counterpoint to soppy stuff like “I bless the day I found you”, even as wonderfully true as the latter may be. Future brides-to-be, don’t pass up the opportunity I missed!
(Based on what I wrote a while back about what I like and don’t like in cover versions, this song goes straight into the Complete Re-Imagining, OMG Awesome! category. Another direct entry is Grizzly Bear’s cover of He Hit Me It Felt Like A Kiss.)
(Endearing extra: The This Corrosion cover can be found on the bonus disc for Lambchop’s album Is A Woman. The bonus disc is called Is A Bonus.)
I have not always been a big fan of the current Pope but upon reading this article in the NYT, I felt all our theological differences melt away. Truly, I can now wholeheartedly accept and follow his leadership of the Cat-holic church, and am keen to learn and absorb his many teachings about the Cat-echism. Furever and ever, amen.
Via J-Walk, I enjoyed this summary of what goes on during Bob Dylan’s radio show.
Here are all the topics on which he’s given out Useful Tips:
- How to Hang Dry Wall
- What to Pack When You’re Traveling
- How to Walk Like A Runway Model
- How to Give Yourself Dreadlocks
Here are some quotes. Almost all are very endearing, it was tough to pick just a few:
- “The distinctive voice of Aaron Neville. A lot of people think we sing the same.”
- Re: Tex William’s Brother Drop Dead - “Some people die too soon. Others, you’re kind of hoping. Tex Williams has a song for such a situation.”
- Re: Howlin’ Wolf - “This next song is entirely without flaw and meets all the supreme standards of excellence.”
- “The harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.” (I’ve never met anyone else who agrees with me on this, but I’m not ashamed to say it - I love the sound of the harmonica! And it’s pretty much because of Bob Dylan.)
- “A giraffe can go a long time without water. But he wants to see a menu right away.”
After reading all this I instantly wanted to listen to him, but unfortunately all my Dylan albums are still back in my old room at my family’s place. I haven’t moved my CD collection over yet because, well, there’s no shelf over here capable of accommodating it. Perhaps a trip to IKEA this weekend…
(Short update: Decided Movable Type was crap. Tried to migrate entries to Wordpress. Numerous problems. Decided Wordpress was crap. Cussed a lot. Considered quitting blogging. Solved the numerous problems. Whooped and cheered a lot. Crowned myself supergenius. For the moment, finalizing new Wordpress design but maintaining old Movable Type installations just in case.)
While gremlin-fighting continues, I’m resorting to lazy linkblogging. Check out these hip-hop animals at the Animal Pharm. (Thanks to brother-in-law James for sending me the link.) My favourite is the animal formerly known as ?uestlove.
We do a fair bit of cooking but I haven’t bothered to write much about it here since cooking is hardly a novelty to either of us. For the same reason, I have hardly any photos of the stuff we’ve cooked so far, because taking a photograph of my food before eating it would just never occur to me. But since my sister was crouching over our baked fish, snapping away like the keen food photographer she’s become, I thought I’d try my hand at it too, and am quite happy with the result.
It’s fish baked Greek style with dill, tomatoes and potatoes, from a Nigel Slater recipe. We used kurau (threadfin) steaks, and the dill is from our makeshift balcony herb garden. It’s a pretty great recipe because you hardly have to do anything - you chuck potatoes, onions and garlic in a baking tray with olive oil, bake for 10 minutes (180C), add the fish on top and surround it with tomatoes, season with herbs, lemon juice, salt and pepper, bake for 35 minutes more and it comes out perfect.
Apart from that, we also made chicken piccata and roasted aubergine, tomato and chickpea soup, and much credit for the delicious success of those dishes goes to the reliability of Elise’s recipes. My mum made braised cabbage with wholegrain mustard, which went very well with everything else, and I whipped up apple, pear and banana smoothies for dessert. It was probably the easiest, cheapest, least stressful, most universally successful dinner party we’ve ever done. And contrary to Alec’s yuppie parody, I can assure you that all ingredients (except the chickpeas, weirdly, we needed Cold Storage for those) can be purchased in NTUC Marine Parade.
Due to an extended period of Movable Type related chaos involving a perfectly good MT 3.2 installation suddenly refusing to work, deceptively simple MT 4.1 upgrade instructions totally divorced from the horrible reality of the process, error messages in several different fruit flavours, lousy support documentation by Movable Type all round (you get the feeling they’re trying to conceal the sheer multitude of problems that can arise - all the solutions to my problems were not found in their documentation but in blogs or contributed by users in the Movable Type forum), and much swearing, Googling and cgi patching by me, the nuts and bolts of this blog might be a bit fucked up while I sort out all the things broken by the upgrade.
For example, search doesn’t work and the category archives that used to list in the sidebar have gone fishing. Also, comments don’t work if you click the “Comments” link at the bottom of an entry, but they will if you click the permalink (i.e. the time of posting) and write your comment into the form there instead. Feel free to mention anything else you’ve noticed.
Why not just use Wordpress, you wonder? Damn good question, and I’m considering it seriously. I even installed Wordpress on my server in the midst of my frustrations last week and have been tinkering round - I’m not sold on it yet, but where I was previously too lazy to switch over because I didn’t feel like having to recode my templates, I’m now sufficiently pissed off at Movable Type to see it as a matter of principle. So perhaps change gon’ come, depending on whether my principled outrage manages to trump my congenital laziness. We’ll see.
I have never had much patience for people who dismiss hip-hop as being only about gangstas, bitches and hos, or people who like poetry (especially slam poetry) but don’t extend the same regard or respect to rap. It smacks of ignorance and laziness, like someone picking up A Clockwork Orange and concluding it sucks within the first few pages because they don’t get all the weird language about droogs and devotchkas.
Snoop Dogg has always been a problem for my campaign, not least when I was still in London, listening to Still Dre in my room in the Catholic hall and the elderly nun who ran the place knocked on the door to discuss something with me - during a perfectly timed lull in the conversation while I was standing in the doorway talking to her, my speakers loudly proclaimed “It’s the motherfuckin’ D O double G / Snoop Dogg, mothaFUCKAS!!!” Still, despite myself I rather enjoyed this interview (Emma Forrest) in The Guardian. Excerpt:
I have worn scuffed Converse, boy jeans and a T-shirt to this interview because I didn’t want Snoop to look at me sexually. And yet I find myself asking the next question, when the publicist pops her head in to say “two more minutes”. I stare at him, staring at himself and it comes out like Tourette’s.
“What would be my market value, if you were still pimping?”
Snoop looks up, with interest, for the very first time. He looks at my face, my hair. He appears to do a sum in his head.
“Stand up real quick, let me see.”
And I do.
“Oh! You built nice! You built like a black girl! You been sitting on a fortune. You need the right person to represent you, get the connection. You could be in the $4,000 range.”
Snoop was right. Us Jews do have all the money. All the time I had been wondering where mine was, when it was right behind me.
