Goofiest pop thing not involving "Gaga" (and probably NSFW, w/o headphones)

Mary Robinette Kowal has been showing this to people.

Abbey Lincoln, 1930-2010

Abbey Linoln, who'd just turned 80 on our mutual birthday anniversaries Friday a week ago, died yesterday. She made it to eighty.

She wasn't the most technically dexterous of jazz singers, didn't break as many pathways as Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald (few, if any, of Lincoln's gerneration did or could) but she was a restless artistic spirit, unafraid to push her considerable ability to its limits, and with her then husband Max Roach in the latter '50s began a lifelong engagement with liberation activism...and by the early 't0s had also branched out into an ating career (I first remember seeing her thus kn the 1964 film Nothing but a Man, though as a child I'd no doubt seen her in, I thought, I Spy and more kid-oriented series--but it seems she guested on Mission: Impossible, not I Spy). The one obit I've seen/heard so far, from NPR, was careful to note her performances of the Freedom Now Suite, but failed to mention such follow-ups as It's Time, and tended to gloss over most of her continuing career as a musician. I've posted this here before, but we can only hope that Lincoln had achieved her personal Africa, either before her decath, or in whatever afterlife their could be:



From Night Music, the NBC-syndicated series around the turn of the '90s:


From her fifth, I believe, album, but perhaps her first recorded composition:

FFB & M: Bill Pronzini, SIX-GUN IN CHEEK (Crossover Press, 1997); Fairport Convention, HEYDAY (Hannibal 1987)

"Americana"




Bill Pronzini had assembled both Gun in Cheek (1982) and Son of Gun in Cheek (1987; perhaps sadly not Gun in the Other Cheek, which might be accused of echoing Ellison or the Secret Policemen) out of his fond memories of some of the worst in crime fiction, picking through his extraordinary personal library and beyond, and Mysterious Press published those, perhaps with not the greatest sales among his biliography but I doubt they actually lost money for anyone...but there wasn't as much publisher interest in a companion devoted to the similar worst of western fiction till Steve Stillwell and Bruce Taylor convinced him to do it for their Crossover Press in 1997, publishing a limited edition with minimal distribution...I have copies because Pronzini was willing to offer copies for sale from his own stash, and might still; interested parties should drop him an email at pronhack@comcast.net.

It's a pity that this book has been so obscure from jump, as it's more relaxed than its companions, and draws on at least as broad a swath of bad pulp, lending-library, paperback, and other sources over the last century...and so as with the other volumes, you get a good sense of a lot of the less ambitious, I think it's usually fair to say, realms of publishing (and perhaps a bit saddening where not fair, as older writers faded and newer ones took on more than they could handle, all put on public display when they really shouldn't've). Pronzini doesn't spare himself, either, in describing at reasonable length one of his least-proud moments, a collaboration with Jeffrey Wallmann on one of the lead novellas published in the revived late '60s/early '70s Zane Grey Western Magazine, under the byline of Grey's son, Romer Zane Grey, as they all were for no compelling reason (at least the ghosted Mike Shayne novelets in stablemate Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine were all attributed to the Davis Dresser pseudonym put to the original novels in the sequence, "Brett Halliday"). And Pronzini isn't the only good western writer tagged here for sins, or at least what Pronzini enjoys dubbing Alternative writing. Sadly, I can't find again, among the many examples of Overly Colorful abuse of antiquated and utterly fabricated language attributed to various stalwart and blackhearted characters, the most ridiculous villain's name...I'll add it to the post when I locate it again.

Pronzini notes, not incorrectly, that the western is an American artform, much as hardboiled crime-fiction was pretty much born in the US...but hardly the only art born here and not the only one to also find excellent practitioners abroad (Jorge Luis Borges alone, with his stories of Argentine ranchfolk and their colleagues, would be enough of an argument against US exceptionalism). Musically, jazz, blues, bluegrass and rock music took shape in the States, as well, among other forms, and when British bands could show, particularly in the 1960s, a facility for similar work, sometimes Well-Meaning folks such as record producer Joe Boyd tried to steer them away from exploring American music too thoroughly...so a lot of the songs, collected from late '60s recording sessions for BBC Radio shows for the various forms of Heyday over the last couple of decades, were never given full studio recording by Fairport Convention, the most important and longlived of the UK's folk-rock bands, in most ways the correspondent to the American Byrds. Boyd takes the blame for that in his liner notes, at least in part (and he calls such Canadian composer-performers as Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen American, but perhaps they had emigrated at the time). The grumpy young bandmembers (see photo above), already having faced tragedy (several members of the original lineup were killed or injured in a traffic accident before these recordings, after their eponymous first album) and weren't yet quit of it (their second female vocalist, Sandy Denny [above], would die in a fall down a stairwell shortly after leaving the band to form her own, Fotheringay), but they could (write and) record a jokey "If It Feels Good, You Know It Can't Be Wrong" as elegantly as they could a bitter "Reno, Nevada" (a composition by the doomed Yank Richard Fariña), an awestruck original "Shattering Live Experience" as deftly as the similarly besotted Cohen love song "Suzanne"...and such songs of uncertain and lost love as Mitchell's "I Don't Know Where I Stand" and ex-Byrd Gene Clark's "Tried So Hard." The latter-day expanded editions are simply an even better reason to seek this out.

From a few months earlier than the BBC recordings, a slightly rough but quite pleasantly improvisational performance of "Reno, Nevada" by the original Fairport lineup for French tv, featuring singer and multi-instrumentalist Judy Dyble and drummer Martin Lamble (one of the auto-accident fatalities):



For more "forgotten" books this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: HOTWIRE #2, edited by Glenn Head (Fantagraphics, 2008)

Fantagraphics is a comics company with a mission to further the art of comics, and to provide a home for artiness...built around the relatively serious magazine, now a periodical book, The Comics Journal, their first big commercial splash was thanks to the Hernandez brothers, Jaime and Gilbert and occasionally Mario, the writer/artists of Love and Rockets, running accounts of life today and in various points in the past of characters in and around Los Angeles and, in Gilbert's stories, in a small town in an unnamed Central American country apparently south of Mexico. But L&R hasn't been the only project, either of the Hernandezes nor of Fantagraphics, which latter has had considerable commercial success of late with their complete collections, an ongoing series, of Charles Schulz's newspaper strips (they'll be tackling Walt Kelly soon)...and the publisher has been a haven for alternative comics over the last couple of decades, publishing (however irregularly) a number of anthologies and single-creator titles out of the "underground" and "alternative" traditions of the 1960s onward...the Hernandezes are of this community, as are such folks as Roberta Gregory and Dan Clowes.

Which brings us to Hotwire (or at least this Hotwire, as opposed to, say, Warren Ellis's project of the same title), with the the slightly more sedate Mome the major anthology comics currently published by Fantagraphics, and both treated as periodical books rather than as newsstand magazines (times are tough, and the shelf-life of books is, of course, greater...and they are marginally less-wastefully distributed). The 2008, second volume of the (I believe) ongoing annual series of oversized anthologies (the magazine has roughly the dimensions of Life or Interview magazines) is about evenly split between color and black and white comics, and features a mix of relatively straightforward narrative and utterly impressionistic comics art. One of my old favorites, Mary Fleener, has an apparently autobiographical story involving a very bad trip involving PCP-laced pot ("Niacin")--as usually with Fleener, things get Very Cubist in her artwork as emotions run high and situations grow fraught. Editor Glenn Head (as to whether that's a nome di fumetti or whether these are legally Head comics is a question I haven't yet pursued) has a decent vignette from the intersecting lives of a stressed psychiatric patient and unhappy wife and the hardly happier Wilhelm Reich (and what befalls him, at least). It's quite a melange, including bits of hardboiled comics of the kind Fred Wertham wouldn't care for at all on over to those he might not be able to make hide nor hair of, including a rather blunt parody of Frank Miller, shown eating canned Mickey Spillane excrement for inspiration.

Joe Bob would definitely have you check it out, even if the indulgence of some of the more rococo post-underground tendencies can get a bit heavy here.

For more "forgotten" books today, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Early August "Forgotten" Music: the Pleasure Seekers

The largely Quatro-sister-populated band, including Suzi Quatro whose solo career peaked in the 1970s and Patti Quatro, who left the Pleasure Seekers and a few years later joined that other all-female band Fanny, flourished in Detroit in the mid to late 1960s, beginning to record in 1965.

Profile Page Link:
http://www.reverbnation.com/pleasureseekers
Songs:
http://www.reverbnation.com/artist/artist_songs/432453
Photos:
http://www.reverbnation.com/page_object/page_object_photos/432453

From the Quatro Sisters' MySpace page:
http://www.myspace.com/pleasureseekerscradle

The Pleasure Seekers clealy named themselves for the 1964 film. Wikipedia notes that 'in 1968, they were the earliest all girl rock group to be signed to a major label, Mercury Records. They released a second single, "Light of Love" b/w "Good Kind of Hurt", with both singles charting.'

1990 reunion concert...doing a bit of a Motown medley (fuller video here):

Heatwave - The Pleasure Seekers

Derek | MySpace Video

B&N joins Borders as For Sale

Big box bookstore chains are not quite dead, but continue to wane...B&N, the healthier of the two big chains, put itself up for sale today.

Here's the online Publisher's Weekly account.