Carrie Brownstein: Funny

Inspired by the news that The Beegees'"Staying Alive" has the perfect beat for CPR, the multi-talented Ms. Brownstein offers some other songs that can save your life in certain situations:

2. Cougar or Bear Attack

When confronted by a bear or cougar while hiking, camping or mountain-biking, don't leave your survival up to chance. We all know that freezing, making yourself look bigger, maintaining eye contact and backing away slowly are the correct survival methods in this situation. But most people decide, wrongly, to run. However, many survivors of bear and cougar attacks have one thing in common: They all reported humming the tune "Suite: Judy Blues Eyes" by Crosby, Stills & Nash. It helps to hum the tune out loud, but only the end. (Yes, the "do do do do do DO DO do do do do" part.) When the bear or cougar retreats in response to this life-affirming melody, Crosby, Stills, Nash & You have won.

She also explains what songs to sing/hum/listen to in the event of choking ("War"), fire ("A Horse with No Name"), shuttlecock-retrieval-related falling ("Baby Got Back"), and joke-performance asphyxiation in a dry-cleaning bag ("A Case of You").

Harry Belafonte and DNC '68

(via BB)

Dock Ellis

In 1970, Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the San Diego Padres. In 1984, he claimed that he was high on LSD during the game and hardly recalls it:

I can only remember bits and pieces of the game. I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the (catcher's) glove, but I didn't hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn't hit hard and never reached me.

Barbara Manning and the SF Seals (awesome name, no?) wrote a song about the game, which, along with a cool drawing and some more information about Dock Ellis, can be found here.

(via a convoluted path too complicated to attribute, but here are the Wikipedia pages for Dock Ellis and Barbara Manning. Trippy picture via The Psychedelic Shakespeare Solution.)

"less about the famous concert and yoga in the mud"

Something about this picture from the New York Times article about the opening of the Woodstock museum, dedicated to preserving the memory of the concert and increasing revenue for Sullivan County, suggests that the reporting therein won't be of the highest caliber. For instance:

So about 60 percent of the museum is about the politics and culture and music of the ’60s: pillbox hats, Elvis, the Bay of Pigs, the Beatles, civil rights, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. And the rest is a quite vivid re-creation of the chaotic and unlikely process that led to 500,000 people shouting, “No rain, no rain, no rain,” during the summer downpours, Jimi Hendrix’s legendary performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and all the rest.

(Link)

the choir

Broadsides hide nothing, as their name implies. Meant to induce action or rekindle loyalty to one specific cause or another, they dispense with subtlety and appeal to the strong emotions people have already developed about the subject. They do not induce analytical thinking. A performance, say, of political speeches and songs curated under the auspices of Howard Zinn in Portland, OR, would be unlikely to change anyone's mind because such a performance, naturally, attracts like-minded thinkers.

Carrie Brownstein writes about this event in her NPR blog, Monitor Mix. She cites "a brief excerpt from Eugene Debs' incredible 1918 court speech" as a highlight. Here is an excerpt of the excerpt:

And here let me emphasize the fact-and it cannot be repeated too often-that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

There is nothing wrong Eugene V. Debs or what he has to say here. It just seems so obvious. Later, she says that she was "happy to think that in exchange for a picture with the actor after the show, these fans had to sit through two hours of fiery speeches." Perhaps, she thinks, "this should always be the price we pay for frivolity."

But how would wading through two hours of stuff like this help anyone think for themselves? It wouldn't. They would just become zombies, riding their bikes to rallies.

Lastly, on Sunday, Barack Obama held a rally at Portland's waterfront. Over 70,000 people attended, a record number for his campaign. I rode my bike downtown and merged with a crowd of unfamiliars. My friends were far behind me in the audience or way towards the front and I floated in the middle, feeling perfectly content to experience the event on my own, mostly because I was hardly alone at all. I admit to getting chills when the Obama family took the stage, the crowd surging and cheering and allowing ourselves to imagine a new set of possibilities. Certainly that's been the part of me, of us, that needs rebooting when it comes to politics: optimism, and the will to fight.

Hot Poop

Santa Barbara has spawned several ground-breaking artistic creations, such as Kinsey Millhone, Lew Archer, and Jack Johnson. In the late sixties and early seventies, it also incubated a strange crew of people that started a band called Hot Poop. Though they were living in Isla Vista, which was churning in the wake of the burning of a Bank of America, they were not hippies, as they explained to WFMU's Beware of the Blog:

We were never hippies. We were much too cynical. We could see where it was all headed. People don't change and you can only run around waving flowers for so long. In retrospect I really wish that whole movement had figured out a way to get some real power and had changed society. There's too much war, too much violence, too much fear. Whatever happened to make love not war? [....] That [having his head bloodied by police] happened when I was learning about the deep corruption in law enforcement and government up close and personal. I was cooking a baked potato and was dragged from my house and beaten by riot police and then charged with felony attack on a police officer performing his line of duty. A campus newspaper photographer got the picture. I appear so much the martyr in this shot that it appeared in many books, etc., about the Isla Vista riots. Did I mention that this all had to do with a bunch of boneheads burning down the Bank of America?

They also explained the "remarkable" album cover, shown above:

The album cover was my concept. I'm surprised that more people don't get the front cover. It seems rather simple. Hot poop, poop also meaning crap. So Larry's taking a crap, it's being carried over to the others by Jim, Lisa is heating it up (cooking it) in a spoon, I'm shooting it up (doing it) and Bruce is passed out. Hot Poop, doing their own stuff (shit). The photograph was taken in an empty building in Isla Vista. The building actually had no front on it but the photographer drew in the front window shadow to give the allusion that it was a complete building with four sides. The back cover concept I came up with in it's entirety. I wanted us standing in a field of donkeys (I get donkeys and mules mixed up. I said a field of donkeys but I meant a field of mules) with two pictures, one clothed and the other with switched genitalia. In one more amazing Hot Poop moment I stumbled on a field of donkeys/mules almost the second I came up with the idea. We got the photographer and drove out there. The mules were nice enough to crowd around us for the pictures. As we were wrapping it up a helicopter started flying over as I think the land belonged to Union Oil.

(Link, via BoingBoing)