Pop Culture Blog: Music, Movie and Humor

Leveraging low-hanging synergies outside the vertical fruit box since 1999.

Friday’s Quizzlet: The C*nt Of Monte Cristo.


in Monday's Quotelet

Appetizer: Do you button shirts top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top?
Top to bottom. Doesn’t everybody? You know how women’s buttons are on the left, and men’s buttons are on the right? Maybe it’s the other way around. I’m a little confused because I wore my yellow kimono today. I’ll get back to you/beaten up on my walk home through Downtown Crossing.

Soup: What is your favorite sandwich?
Those deep-fried Monte Cristos you get at Bennigans. Take a grilled cheese sandwich, and use mayonnaise to grill it instead of butter. Then dip it in batter and deep fry it. Then remove your heart from your chest, roll it in rough sawdust and place it back into your cavity like some sort of indecisive Mola Ram.

Salad: What was a family project you helped work on as a child?
My father built a sweet treehouse for me when I was a yute, and I suppose I must have helped a little bit. He took two computer crates, back when computers were the size of refrigerators, and stacked them on top of each other next to a 15 foot dead tree. He cut a door in the front, and then a ladder went up through both crates – so it was like a two-story apartment. Then he covered the crates in split logs so it looked like a cabin. The ladder continued up through the top of the upper crate and onto a big rickety deck he built on top of the stump. It was amazing and I will see if I can find and scan an old photo (update: found and scanned). There has never been a better treehouse in which to play doctor. Thanks, Kathy, wherever you are. Although I remember killing a lot of frogs in there, too. Jesus, that’s hot.

A note on the photo – that’s my Grandmother, Claire, in the aviators holding the Yorkie (Buffy) and her friend Pat standing behind me – we’re a good 3 stories off the ground. Pat was a nice lady, but looked an awful lot like Roger Ebert. The photo was taken in Manotick, Ontario circa 1981. The beginning of my obsession with Raiders of the Lost Ark was only weeks away.

Main Course: When have you acted phony?
I was privvy to a nasty secret once, between a group of very close friends, that I pretended to be completely ignorant of for several days. I eventually, and for very good reason that I can’t go into, spilled the beans and subsequently created a string of incidents that got very ugly indeed. I’m sure you’ve all been there. And probably with the same horrible, cum-dumpster of a girl. How is she, by the way? What’s the matter? She can’t call nobody?

Dessert: Do you write letters or postcards? If so, to whom?
Your Mom. I send checks to people who send me bills. So there’s a bit of give and take there. It’s sorta like a relationship with a pen pal, you could say. A dirty penpal, who always wants something from you. I am in an unhealthy, abusive pen pal relationship with NStar.

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Halloween Costume Request.


in

This venue worked well earlier this month for my DVD related request – so I’m going to give it another shot. Simply put – does anyone have a Drew Bledsoe jersey? Patriots, Cowboys, Bills – no matter. Just needs to say Bledsoe on the back. It’s Halloween costume related, so you’ll get it back in a couple of weeks. I’ve got a funny idea, and I’d rather not order something online that may not get here in time when this city used to be flooded with Drew-related schwag and there may be some remnants under somebody’s bed. I quiver with antici……… pation.

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Wednesday Wadio: Black Grape’s ‘Reverend Black Grape’.


in Wednesday Wadio

“We all hated each other, I just started speaking to me brother again. But the rest of the Mondays, they’re just a joke. One of the guitarists is selling encyclopedias door-to-door and another one’s a cook. They’re a bunch of d*cks. I tried me hardest to tell them not to split the band. It was just b*llocks. The rest of them thought they were rock Gods. They just wanted money. They didn’t care about music.” – Shaun Ryder on why he formed Black Grape

I love the Happy Mondays, and I get a lot of subsequent grief from friends and family surrounding that fact. But I simply can’t apologize – Some people like marmite. Some people like anchovies. I love the Mondays and Shaun Ryder. There’s no accounting for taste, as they say. Class, charm and the ability to pick up audible sounds, maybe – but never taste.

After the band imploded in 1993, Ryder and Bez formed Black Grape and had three top ten hits off the first album, It’s Great When You’re Straight, Yeah! The best of which was Reverend Black Grape and you can listen to it now by clicking the Zap button on Radio Pye in the left hand column. Surprisingly to many who wrote Ryder off as a drug-addled maniac (if the shoe fits…), Grape took the charts by storm during 1995 and many reviewers actually preferred them to Ryder’s previous incarnation: “Heavily steeped in the funk, ex-Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder comes off here like a Mancunian George Clinton as he babbles over top of a skilled, polyrhythmic unit that’s far tighter than the slapdash Mondays.” – Amazon

The hodgepodge tune includes a scitar, dancehall chirping courtesy of rapper Kermit, a rousing and uplifting chorus, old-school samples (listen carefully for the Hitler speech), bongos, some sort of snake-charmer flute thing and even a harmonica. The production values are riotus and there’s a damn good reason this record made multiple ‘album of the year’ lists in the UK. Above the din, Ryder’s trademark non-sensical lyrics still serve their purpose. It’s more style than substance – Shaun is truly hooked on his own phonics (no, that’s not a new type of meth-amphetamine), and it works:

“The title of the album partly expressed Ryder’s decision to turn away from hard drug abuse, and this was indeed a comparatively sober effort given the artist’s past reputation. However, his much-publicized “cut-up” lyrics were present, along with his trademark scat coupling of meaningless phrases…” – MusicStrands.com

Nope – Ryder, Bez and the rest of the two gangs aren’t for everybody. But as I saw for myself when I snuck into the Mondays show here in Boston in 1990 (I was 16 or 17 – in retrospect, maybe it was a wristbanded, all-ages event) it’s more about the party than getting the guitar tuned and hitting all the notes properly. Oh, and a fucking shitload of hard drugs, too.

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Defender Of The Crown.


in

Nearly 32 years have passed without my having endured any signifigant oral trauma. Unless of course you count that one time in University when I woke up after a tryst feeling like my ‘special purpose’ had been sharpened by a beaver and added to a dam. Otherwise – lovely girl.

I’m told that my good dental luck stems from the fact that there is so much flouride in the water in Canada. I registered at a new dentist Friday after many years of truancy, and I now have an inevitable laundry list of repairs that are going to have to be made. The hygenist that cleaned my teeth said she had no comments regarding my general care – she was impressed. But as she packed up and got ready for the doctor, she eluded to a few issues that went beyond simple maintenance. My luck had run out.

Genetic enamel deficiency is the long term problem. If you want to suck face after looking at that link, ladies – take a number. But mine isn’t too advanced and can be remedied with some artful bonding at the hands of my new yapper doctor, who seems like a great guy. I think I lucked out. But the immediate issue, which I was asked to rush back today to take care of, is my back right molar which has completely split vertically down the middle. I looked at it in the mirror and it was alarming – and a symptom of the overall enamel problem.

So I went in today for the first step in the crown procedure, which is to file down the tooth into a shadow of its formal self, and then take a mold for a porcelain replacement which will be constructed over the next couple of weeks. It did not go smoothly, and as I write I can feel the whackload of novocaine I was jagged with starting to wear off. I have a temporary cap over the little nub, but I predict problems before I get to wear the actual crown. Like King Richard.

The nerve that the doctor was trying to hit with the novocaine runs a different route in my face than is usual, apparently. The first shot gave me a little tingle, and the doctor started to file away. Whenever he’d hit the top of the tooth, where the crack is, this tremendous bolt of pain would rocket through my jaw. He gave me another and tried again. Same thing. Another. ZING. Another – the final count was 5 units. The amazed dental assistant showed me the empty glass vials incredulously while the doctor was seeing to someone else. She called me tough, and I replied “Lady, i don’t want to be tough today.” I began to pray feverishly for the drug tolerance of River Phoenix.

For the last shot, the doctor angled the needle away from where you’re normally supposed to strike, and went very, very deep. I felt the left half of my face shut down immediately, and he was able to finish the job at hand. He told me not to go back to work, as apparently he felt he’d used enough of the drug to drop Kong, and I took the T home. So my point is, nearly 32 years of having cooperative choppers has come to an end, and I’m now about to embark on all the cringe-worthy stuff most people have already experienced by my age. Maybe now I’ll be able to better appreciate Marathon Man.

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