Lonnie Donegan

music

Born on this date, the father of British skiffle. See Bruce Eder’s bio-sketch and Mark Kermode’s “My 20-year love affair with the joy of skiffle“

Jimmy Page, aged 14, appeared on television playing guitar in a well-groomed schoolboy skiffle combo. ‘And are you going to continue to play skiffle when you leave school?’ asked the interviewer earnestly. ‘Er, no,’ replied Page politely, ‘I want to do biological research’ – which indeed he did, sort of.

He’s relatively little remembered outside of England, but Donegan shares an important professional attribute with Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Sex Pistols — he invented a style of music, skiffle, that completely altered the pop culture landscape and the youth around him, and for a time, completely ruled popular music through that new form. What’s more, his music, like that of Presley and Haley, was vital to the early musical careers and future histories of the Beatles, the Stones, and hundreds of other groups. And he did it in 1954, before Elvis was known anywhere outside of Memphis and before Bill Haley was perceived as anything but a Western swing novelty act.

Walker Percy Wednesday – 12

walker percy

The sun is shining, people live well, go about satisfying their needs and achieving goals, work at creative jobs, attend cultural attractions, participate in interesting groups. This is, by every calculation, as it should be. Yet it was on just such a day as this, an ordinary Wednesday or Thursday, that he felt the deepest foreboding. And when his doctor, seeking to reassure him, suggested that in these perilous times a man might well be entitled to such a feeling, that only the insensitive did not, etc., it made him feel worse than ever. The analyst had got it all wrong. It was not the prospect of the Last Day which depressed him but rather the prospect of living through an ordinary Wednesday morning.

Walker Percy, Philosopher

A Confederacy of Dunces: extracts (51)

john kennedy toole

His blue and yellow eyes rested on an unopened manila envelope on the top of the toilet. For quite a while Ignatius had been trying to decide whether or not he would open the envelope. The trauma of having found employment had affected his value negatively, and he was waiting until the warm water in which he wallowed like a pink hippopotamus has a calming effect upon his system. Then he would attack the envelope. Paradise Vendors should prove to be a pleasant employer. He would spend his time parked somewhere by the river accumulating thoughts for the Journal. Mr. Clyde had a certain paternal quality that Ignatius liked; the old man, the scarred and wizened mogul of the frankfurter, would be a welcome new character in the Journal. At last Ignatius felt relaxed enough and, raising his dripping hulk out of the water, picked up the envelope. He tore the envelope open, wetting the paper, and pulled out a folded poster that said in large letters:

LECTURE! LECTURE!

M. Minkoff speaks boldly about

“Sex in Politics: Erotic Liberty as a Weapon Against Reactionaries”

8 p.m. Thursday, the 28th

Y.M.C.A. – Grand Concourse

Admission: $1.00 – OR – Sign M. Minkoff’s Petition Which Aggressively Demands More and Better Sex for All and a Crash Program for Minorities! (The petition will be mailed to Washington.) Sign now and save America from sexual ignorance, chastity, and fear. Are you committed enough to help in this bold and crucial movement?

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Dumpstaphunk: new album

funk

The sludgiest groove around. Overlooking the typo (plant should read planet) here is the best characterization (written by David Kunian) I’ve come across of the band:

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The Evolutionary Invisible Hand: The Problem of Rational Decision-Making and Social Ordering over Time

classical liberalism

The latest in the series.

Walker Percy Wednesday – 11

walker percy

So thoroughly in fact did he identify with his group companions of the moment, so adept did he become at role-taking, as the social scientists call it, that he all but disappeared into the group. As everyone knows, New York is noted for the number and variety of the groups with which one might associate, so that even a normal person sometimes feels dislocated. As a consequence this young man, dislocated to began with, hardly knew who he was from one day to the next. There were times when he took roles so successfully that he left off being who he was and became someone else. . . . So well did he adapt that it always came as a surprise when two groups who got along with him did not get along with each other. For example, he had fallen in with an interracial group which met at a writer’s apartment in the Village on Friday nights. It did not strike him as in the least anomalous that on Saturday night he met with the Siberian Gentlemen, a nostalgic supper club of expatriate Southerners, mostly lawyers and brokers, who gathered at the Carlyle and spoke of going back to Charleston or Mobile. At two or three o’clock in the morning somebody would sigh and say, “You can’t go home again,” and everybody would go back to his Park Avenue apartment. One night he made the mistake of bringing a friend from the first group to the second, a Southerner like himself but a crude sort who had not yet mastered group skills and did not know the difference between cursing the governor of Virginia, who was a gentleman, and cursing the governor of Alabama, who was not.

Walker Percy, Philosopher

A Confederacy of Dunces: extracts (50)

john kennedy toole

“The sisters loved Ignatius. He was such a darling child. He used to win all them little holy pictures for knowing his catechism.”

“Them sisters shoulda knocked his head in.”

“When he useta come home with all them little holy pictures,” Mrs. Reilly sniffed, “I sure never thought then he’d end up selling weenies in the broad daylight.” Mrs. Reilly coughed nervously and violently into the telephone. “But tell me. sweetheart, how Angelo’s making out?”

“His wife Rita rings me up a little while ago to tell me she thinks he”s coming down with pneumonia from being stuck in that toilet all the time. I tell you true, Irene, that Angelo’s getting as pale was a ghost. The cops sure don’t treat that boy right. He loves the force. When he graduated from the cops’ academy, you woulda thought he just made it outta the Ivory League. He was sure proud.”

“Yeah, poor Angelo looks bad,” Mrs. Reilly agreed. “He’s got him a bad cough, that boy. Well, maybe he’ll feel a little better after he reads that thing Ignatius gave me to give him. Ignatius says it’s inspirational literature.”

“Yeah? I wouldn’t trust no ‘inspirational literature’ I got from that Ignatius. It’s prolly fulla dirty stories.” 

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