January 13, 2003

the chirping hour

The ukulele has arrived, and it's a beauty. My dog will have fleas for a good long while, I hope. Plus, I've discovered the best ukulele instruction site ever.

Also newly arrived: a care package from Mike Alway of Él Records, including The Cool Mikado, the soundtrack to a swingin' Brit adaptation of the genuine Gilbert & Sullivan item that's alleged to be one of the worst films of all time. I was hoping for a little more twistedness, but the John Barry Seven's "Tit Willow Twist" is exactly what I wanted out of it. This right after Jennie & Mark gave us a mix CD including the Oranj Symphonette's "Baby Elephant Gun," which gives the same treatment to you-can-guess-what.

I am now working on a small project involving the color yellow. If you happen to particularly like working with yellow, do let me know.

Just finished rereading Within the Context of No Context, which includes a paragraph so good I ripped off bits of it yesterday for something else I was writing. Trow is writing about a sealed "Gossip" section in an old issue of Esquire:

"At one moment, the compilers contrived a category of 'Gossips Posing as Journalists,' and they implied that it was not a good thing to be a gossip posing as a journalist; yet revealed through the page like a rash rising through the flesh was the probability that the compilers were themselves gossips posing as journalists. I'm a lady and I'm going to list all the different kinds of whores. There's this whore and that whore. Don't you love whores? There's this whore and that whore and this one who pretends to be a lady. Isn't that funny? Aren't ladies dumb? But I'm a lady. Are you sure I'm a lady? Of course I'm a lady. I'm a lady because I know what a whore does. I know the way a whore walks into the Beverly Hills Hotel. Don't you love the Beverly Hills Hotel? Don't you love the way they know me at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Don't you love the way you feel when you don't know if I like you or not? Don't you love the way you feel when you don't know if you want to be a whore or not? Would you like to be a whore? Would you like to have me arrange for you to be a whore? Am I arranging it now?"

Posted by Douglas at January 13, 2003 11:18 PM