Within Earshot

Farting around with Vonnegut.

Please excuse the infrequency of blog updates over the past week or so. I have been on vacation, road-tripping around the US of A (favourite sighting: a sign for boasting literacy levels at a school that contained the word "learnded").

While in New York State, I popped into the city of Schenectady on a mini-pilgrimage devoted to the late Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favourite novelists. I knew he had lived in Sch'dy (as natives abbreviate it) during his early years working as a PR flack for General Electric, and had been a volunteer firefighter in the area. He alluded to it in one of his best novels, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. If you haven't read any of Vonnegut's books, I suggest you give it a try.

Though there seems to be nothing in Schenectady commemorating Vonnegut's tenure there, some helpful Schenectadites (Schenectatodians?) at a museum pointed me in the direction of a suburb where he lived in the 1950s. With more help from neighbours, I tracked down the house where he lived, and I probably confused the current residents by posing for pictures in front of it (they gave me a bit of the stink-eye). Also found the tiny volunteer fire department where he offered his services.

The point? No point, really. I did want to feel a bit closer to a writer whose work I've admired for years.

But mostly I was just abiding by this poignant little piece of the author's wisdom (a Vonnugget, if you will):

  

Now I'm off to fart around for a few days in Cincinnati.  Catch y'all later.

Don'tcha dare miss it

Any Canadian who tuned in to WWF wrestling during the Hulkamania era of the 1980s will have the voice of Billy Red Lyons forever engrained into their memory. The wrestler-turned-announcer appeared on every Saturday afternoon program, telling fans about upcoming live wrestling events and imploring: "Don'tcha dare miss it!"

Billy Red Lyons, known to his family and friends as Bill Snip, died Monday night at Freeport Health Centre in Kitchener at age 77.  According to the people I interviewed for this article I wrote about him, he was a gentle and wryly funny man who always put his family first.

Canadian wrestling fans (many of whom are sharing heartfelt memories of Billy Red at the SLAM! Wrestling site), will remember him as a rare gentleman in profession populated by freaks and monsters.  They'll remember him just like this:

Deciphering the Man of Mystery

I just got off the phone with the elusive, highly mysterious and completely freaking awesome musician Leon Redbone. I had my doubts as to whether he'd call at all, since he is notoriously tricky to track down. Almost nothing about his true identity is known, except that he's a virtuoso guitarist with a laconic, instantly recognizable baritone voice. He's definitely going to be a highlight of this year's Kitchener Blues Festival.

He was a regular on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live. Rumours abound about his identity, including theories that he was a character played by Andy Kaufman, he's Bob Dylan's brother, he's a billionaire, and on and on.

He was friendly over the phone, but did nothing to clear the fog surrounding his persona. "There is no fog," he said cryptically. Check out the full story in The Record soon. In the meantime, enjoy this surreal clip of Redbone performing on Alf's talk show.  Yes, apparently Alf the puppet alien had his own talk show. Weird.

Got panache?

 The word "panache" was introduced into the English language by the romantic tragicomedy Cyrano de Bergerac -- an impressive production of which which opened Friday at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (read the review).

The title hero, a lovestruck swashbuckler with a "gross protuberance" of a schnozz, sums up his bravado, poetic talents and charms as "panache."  And what a fantastic word. I've been known to use "panache" when other adjectives, such as "awesomeness" or "gusto" or "razzamatazz," just don't quite deliver the goods.

So we can all thank playwright Edmond Rostand for bestowing upon us such a lovely and occasionally useful word.  Of course, Rostand was wayyy behind the curve compared to William Shakespeare, who practically invented half of the English words and phrases now in common usage. Estimates vary, but it's believed Shakespeare invented/coined/popularized somewhere between 1,700 to 10,000 words and phrases.

Here's a sampling of Shakespeare's contributions. Next to this, "panache" is a pretty paltry achievement.

barefaced

be all and end all

break the ice

breathe one's last

brevity is the soul of wit

catch a cold

clothes make the man

disgraceful conduct

dog will have his day

eat out of house and home

elbowroom

fair play

fancy-free

foregone conclusion

frailty, thy name is woman

give the devil his due

heart of gold

heartsick

hot-blooded

housekeeping

it smells to heaven

it's Greek to me

lackluster

leapfrog

live long day

long-haired

method in his madness

mind's eye

naked truth

one fell swoop

primrose path

strange bedfellows

the lady doth protest too much

the milk of human kindness

too much of a good thing

towering passion

wear one's heart on one's sleeve

witching time of the night

Take THAT, Hitler.

I was at the St. Jacobs Country Playhouse last night to see what turned out to be a fantastic production of the olde-timey feel-goody musical comedy Me and My Girl (read the review here). I had a passing familiarity with the storyline about a Cockney bloke thrust into high society, but until today I didn't realize the play was the basis for a real zinger of anti-Nazi propaganda.

The most famous and ridiculous musical number of the show, The Lambeth Walk, was a runaway hit when the play premiered in London's West End in 1937. It sparked a craze around England, inspiring people to do the nonsensical dance. Of course, people weren't always in the mood for dancing back then, given the looming threat of Adolph Hitler bolstering his Nazi party. And the Nazis reportedly thought the Lambeth Walk dance was an idiotic ritual of "Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping."

In an effort to make Hitler and his armies look like total boobs, a British newsreel company spliced together a propaganda film that, thanks to some snazzy editing, makes it look as if the Nazis are dancing The Lambeth Walk. It was quite an achievement, given the relatively low-tech film equipment of the late 1930s, and it's still pretty dang funny (my personal favourite bits happen after about the 2:04 mark). Enjoy.

Charlie's Angels they ain't.

I recently got a press release from a group of women called The Savage Sisters. They seem to be a cabal of women who have splintered off from the local roller derby league to form some kind of entertainment/music/violence collective.

According to the press release, the Savage Sisters are "an elite group of 13 women who have emerged from the urban jungle wielding machetes to cut a deliberate path to a brave new underground -- an underground where excellent entertainment is encouraged as a necessary release and savoured as religion."  I'm intrigued and a-scared.

This much is certain: the Savage Sisters have put together a wicked rock show for Friday July 3 at The Boathouse in Kitchener, featuring Maximum RnR, the Greasemarks and K-W's own punk miscreants The Rotten. It should be a great show. How could it not be great with a poster as gnarly as this?!?

Guess who's 55

 Through a completely random series of web-surfing flukes, I just discovered that today is the 55th birthday of Mark Linn-Baker.

Ten points if, right off the top of your head, you can say who Mark Linn-Baker is.

Need a hint?  He played a character on TV.  His character was a young, ambitious (if somewhat neurotic) man who packed up his things and left his suburban life to seek his fortune in the big city of Chicago.  But his plans are thrown for a loop when his long-lost cousin from a tiny Mediterranean island called Mypos shows up at his doorstep, and wacky misadventures ensued.

Yes, Mark Linn-Baker, who turns 55 years old today, played Cousin Larry (opposite the hilariously befuddled Cousin Balki) on the heartwarmingly cornball '80s sit-com Perfect Strangers.

  I was overcome by a strange moment of nostalgia when I stumbled across the mention of Linn-Baker, since I was reminded of how simple and quaintly moralistic Perfect Strangers was.  Balki was so naive, but his sweet innocence always taught Larry -- and all of us -- an important lesson.

They sure don't make sitcoms like this anymore. Which is probably for the best, really.

Their amps go to 11, too.

When the rock-mockumentary This is Spinal Tap first hit theatres 1984, there was apparently a small contingent of the cinema-going audience that didn't understand what everyone else was laughing at. The depiction of a washed-up metal band was so believable, so authentically pathetic, that people thought the movie was a DOCumentary, not a MOCKumentary.

Coming soon to the Princess Cinema in Waterloo is a film that may cause similar confusion, but in reverse. Anvil: The Story of Anvil is a rockumentary that is so funny, so engaging and so surprisingly poignant that viewers might mistakenly conclude that it's scripted. It chronicles the real-life trials and tribulations of the band Anvil, who in the mid-'80s were poised to vault to stardom alongside Metallica and Guns n' Roses, but instead faded into obscurity.  But they never stopped given'er, and clung tight to the unlikely dream that they would one day be rock megastars. All of which is fodder for one of the best documentaries I've seen in I-don't-know-how-long. 

In a cool twist, one of K-Dub's rockingest metal bands, Bravura, will play a short set before all three screenings of the Anvil doc. Screenings are June 30, July 2 and July 3 (check here for details).  Here's a taste of the film's magnificence:

Drunk in Guelph and gotta pee? No problem.

In an effort to prevent boozy revelers from breaking its "anti-fouling" bylaws, the City of Guelph is considering putting "open-air urinals" in the downtown core on weekends. Apparently this measure has already been taken in Manchester, England, leading to a noticeable decrease in the amount of pee being tinkled on people's lawns. (Read all about it).

"I'm not saying it's eradicated the problem, because it hasn't, but we do feel it has significantly cut down on the amount of urinating on people's property," said Manchester city councillor Marc Ramsbottom, whose surname is downright hilarious.

So the open-air urinals are handy, but are they also SEXIST?!  Why don't women get a similar convenience?

Ramsbottom (tee-hee!) has an answer: "I think women tend to behave more appropriately and use the facilities in the licensed establishments," he said.

Hmm.... going to the bathroom in an actual bathroom. Eureka, boys, Eureka!

Get to the choppahhh!!!

On this day 22 years ago, 20th Century Fox released what, to my then-11-year-old mind, was the greatest film ever created. Predator had everything an adolescent boy could yearn for: huge guns, macho action heroes with preposterous physiques, bloodshed galore, the wickedest monster yet devised for film and more one-liners than Rodney Dangerfield.

As far as I could tell, it was worthy of every Oscar in 1987 (yet inexplicably won none). In commemoration of Predator, the apex of '80s action hero filmmaking, check out this surprisingly good hip hop tribute, which summarizes the entire film in about six minutes (still probably a tad longer than necessary, come to think of it).