A Crash Test Dummies throwback for you today.
“I beg your pardon.
I’m not quite clear about what you just spoke…
Was that a parable, or a very subtle joke?”
Category: Music
What the poets are doin’
It seems April is National Poetry Month in the sleeping elephant to the south of us, so here’s a song called “Poets” from Canada’s unofficial poet laureate.
My boss’s last day
My boss Al is retiring and today’s his last day at work. All morning I’ve had this in my head, so I’m sharing with you.
The song doesn’t reflect my or, to my knowledge, Al’s views on the matter.
Edmund Fitzgerald
My first encounter with Gordon Lightfoot’s classic song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was actually reading the lyrics published as a poem in a high-school English reader. (I had a similar experience with Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”, though I think I’d probably heard that one on the radio, my dad being an aficionado of the ’60s station KY58.)
So for Throwback Thursday, please, enjoy this tale of human woe and the sinking of a massive freighter in a storm on (spoiler alert!) Lake Superior.
Header image from Wikimedia Commons, CC-Attribution-Sharealike, originally by Greenmars.
.jpg){kind=link}
Bad Times at the El Royale
Finally, last night, I watched Bad Times at the El Royale. Back when I first saw the trailer, I thought it was an Evans movie for sure, but it ended up playing at the multiplex down the street instead, for all of two weeks. I managed to miss it. Now I regret not seeing it on the big screen.
El Royale takes place at a hotel in Lake Tahoe, on the border between Nevada and California. The border literally bisects the hotel. Rooms on the California side are $1 more per night.
The movie opens with a priest, a singer, and a vacuum-cleaner salesman trying to check in, one lovely afternoon in 1969, but the clerk is nowhere to be found. Once they do track him down, a fourth guest appears, and she’s got some baggage. Well, they all have baggage, but the fourth woman appears to have kidnapped someone.
Of course, this is a noir-ish thriller, and no one—not even the venue—is who they seem to be.
I quite enjoyed El Royale. It felt a lot like a Quentin Tarantino movie, but it was written and directed by Drew Goddard. Goddard managed to take all the good things about a QT movie—colours, music, sudden violent twists—and discard the endless soliloquies. It really makes for a tight, nasty thriller, and it’s just the thing I was looking for.
If you like violence, secrets, thunderstorms, ’60s music, and violence, it might be just what you’re looking for too.
Header image from The Movie DB.
They were fun
We just got in from They Might Be Giants’ Winnipeg concert.
What a great show.
Le tournesol
A song, from my French immersion schooling, about sunflowers. (Every time I see a field of sunflowers, this song comes to me.)
Le tournesol, le tournesol
n’a pas besoin d’une boussole
ni d’arc-en-ciel, ni d’arc-en-ciel
pour se tourner vers le soleil
In English:
The sunflower, the sunflower
has no need of a compass
nor of a rainbow, nor of a rainbow,
to turn its face to the sun
One thing I didn’t remember from elementary school music sessions in the library at École Laurier: that bassline.
This Flight Tonight
Today I learned that this
is a cover of this
(Did you know that?)
Compare & contrast
One of my all-time favourite Christmas carols is “Ça Bergers”. (Most of my favourite carols are French, since I came up in a French immersion school. It makes it hard to find them, living as I do in a predominantly English part of Manitoba. Oh well.)
Every year I look it up on YouTube. The first year, there was one version, not a great one. It sounded like it’d been recorded in a high-school gym onto cassette, and probably was.
This year: There are plenty of choices. Here are a couple for you. (Well, for me.)
The choral version
The death metal version
(with altered lyrics, natch)
Which do you prefer?
Snoopy’s Christmas
For those that didn’t care for yesterday’s Giger delights, I offer this.
When I was a kid, we had this song (along with the other two Snoopy vs. the Red Baron tunes, and a bunch of Royal Guardsmen songs on the B-side) on an LP with a pink cardboard sleeve. I must have come pretty close to wearing the record out over the years.
I actually still have the record (thanks, Mom!) but a) I don’t have a record player and b) it’s pretty badly warped now, so the last time I tried to listen to it, it sped up and slowed down to a degree comparable to the songs they play on Lip Sync Battle.
Fun fact: As a kid I assumed the sound effect on the line “The Baron then offered / A holiday toast” was a toaster popping out toast. Now I know it’s a champagne cork. Ah, youth.