As promised, here's my Picasa photo gallery from our recent trip to Utah and Los Angeles. My wife thinks the Ft. MacArthur tunnel sequence is weird. I think the Circus Liquor Clown is far stranger. And, yes, one of the highlights of the trip was dumpster diving. (For honorable literary purposes, of course.) The trip also featured rubber duckies and catacombs.
I am currently on a post-vacation funk; everything seems kind of blah to me right now. And tonight I have Webelos Den Meeting to come up with. I'm half inclined to simply drive everyone over to a McDonald's for a cone. Or maybe simply give them a basketball and let 'em run around on the court (it wouldn't be the first time such a thing was called a scout meeting).
I've been listening to Alice Cooper's recent album, Welcome 2 My Nightmare, the long-delayed sequel to his Welcome to my Nightmare record from 1975. It's not as good as the original, but it's not bad at all. Good, in fact. A return to form. It got good reviews.
Alice Cooper, nee Vincent Furnier, was originally involved in a rock band with his friends Smith, Dunaway, Bruce and Buxton (now deceased). With them and under the direction of Bob Ezrin he broke into the big time with several early Seventies albums and a road show based on Grand Guignol. (Surely, everyone knows "I'm Eighteen?")
In 1975 he cast his friends aside for another band, the so-called "Hollywood Vampires" featuring professional guitar session men Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter. (Their career highlight was the wonderful, tuneful introduction to Lou Reed's "Sweet Jane.") Cooper's former band released an album as "The Billion Dollar Babies" (I passed on buying it), but it got nowhere.
This new release features personnel from both bands - all together now. Isn't that nice? My favorite song: "I Gotta Get Outta Here." From wikipedia: "...ends the album with Alice finally accepting that he's going through a nightmare, and is ready to wake up. However, a choir of voices responds with "What part of dead don't you get?" Alice starts to protest, but with the repeated question, he begins to wonder what his reality is: Is he actually dead, left to forever live his nightmare, or is this taunt just another part of the dream? The conclusion of the song leaves the ending open to the listener." I like that. Country-Western (!) musician Vince Gill plays the guitar solo.
(In the research for this piece I just learned what Auto-Tune was. Automated pitch correction for singers, pitchy and otherwise. Hmmm. Interesting. I'd like to play with the software.)
I have a 34 minute video I'm trying to upload to youtube; it keeps failing. I'm told that I can now upload videos of more than fifteen minutes, but perhaps I should split this in half... it's a 1952 short film about the city of Burbank. It's comic, being a major example of the uptight civic pride and responsibility genre of film making - the type of thing often spoofed on sketch comedy television shows. But it's coming soon to a monitor near you.
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