"When I was a young girl I used to seek pleasure/When I was a young girl I used to drink ale/Right out of the alehouse and into the jailhouse/Right out of the bar room and down to my grave...."

A song from the great 1969 album "Streetnoise," called to mind this morning on the occasion of spell correct. I've known for a long time that my last name, should I be so weak as to mistype it, spell-corrects to "alehouse," and that has me hearing the voice of Julie Driscoll singing "Right out of the alehouse and into the jailhouse."

I didn't slip so low as to typo my own name this morning. I typo'd "Meadhouse," my name for Meade and me, when we do something together:

Ann Althouse said...

"The shower scene was creepy too and I'm not talking about the movie."

Read aloud and laughed over here at Meadhouse. 

7/21/24, 8:10 AM

The auto-correct on the typo amused me: Madhouse.

1967 — the mood in Tompkins Sq. Park.

The photograph is by James Jowers (American b. 1938), from the George Eastman House Collection. I love the comment at the Flickr page: "A moving paper fantasy...." All the hippies know what that means.

We starve
Look at one another
Short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats
Wearing smells from laboratories
Facing a dying nation
Of moving paper fantasy
Listening for the new told lies
With supreme visions of [???]

Facing a dying nation... that was before Barack Obama, of course. It was before Nixon. In any case, I will be wearing a winter coat today, because it's -16° here (and I am not talking wind chill). Whether I will be walking proudly remains to be seen. But I'm not going to rip off my clothes and twirl around like a hippie in Tompkins Sq. Park in 1967. I do seek to amuse you however, so let me play you the brilliant version of that song — which is called "Flesh Failures" — by one of my very favorite voices, Julie Driscoll.

If you liked that, don't hesitate to buy the whole album, "Streetnoise" — Julie Driscoll with Brian Auger and The Trinity. I've loved that since it came out, back in 1968. It's almost worth the high price for the cool drawing on the cover:



And if you liked the photograph, look at the whole James Jowers set, which the Eastman House tells us is not under copyright.