"A Rather Depressing Gallery of Fat Superheroes."

Here.

Wait. This doesn't depress me:

That completely cheered me up! I'm really happy about Big-Hair/Big-Everything Wonder Woman.

***

And I like that whole blog, Unreality. For example, check out "15 Music Album Cover Replacements to Match the Title."

"Play The Quietus' Album Cover Quiz Game."

Hilarious... even if, like me, you can hardly guess any of them. (Via Metafilter.)

Come on! It's funny. Don't say you "hate mimes." Hating mimes has been a big cliché for more than 30 years.

From the pre-mime-hating period, the supposedly profound ending to highly respected film:



AND: I just want to send my love to The Hello People.

"Hi Boys and Girls, I'm Jimmy Carl Black, and I'm the Indian of the group."

Jimmy Carl Black, RIP.



ADDED: The album cover above is "We're Only in It for the Money," one of my favorite records, which is full of great songs including one that I think is just as appropriate for election eve as that one Andrew Sullivan saw fit to quote today. It goes like this:

There will come a time when everybody
Who is lonely will be free...
To sing & dance & love
There will come a time when every evil
That we know will be an evil...
That we can rise above
Who cares if hair is long or short
Or sprayed or partly grayed...
We know that hair ain't where it's at
(There will come a time when you won't
Even be ashamed if you are fat!)
Wah wah-wah wah
There will come a time when everybody
Who is lonely will be free...
To sing & dance & love (dance and love)
There will come a time when every evil
That we know will be an evil...
That we can rise above (rise above)
Who cares if you're so poor you can't afford
To buy a pair of mod a go-go stretch-elastic pants...
There will come a time when you can even
Take your clothes off when you dance

Sexy Old Album Covers From My Father.

ADDED: This post is a continuation of this.

Here's the part where we talk about Madonna.

Pay special attention to how concerned Bob is about Madonna's bra:



Here's the album cover that made such an impression on Bob:



Here's another album cover we talk about (which may evoke fond/embarrassing memories for some of you):



And I'll see if I can find that old album of my father's that had Anita Ekberg on the cover. BTW, a Google search for Anita Ekberg will give you a NSFW result, so if you want to see a picture, look here.

UPDATE: I made a little video showing those old album covers from my father, beginning with "You're My Thrill," showing Anita Ekberg.

About all that hair.

We all know by now that Christopher Hitchens got a "back, sack and crack wax."

So let's move on to a general contemplation of humanity and its body hair:

It is hard in the West to recall that there was a brief moment when the ladygarden was left untended, and the female body celebrated and desired in its natural state. The actress Sienna Miller is now filming Hippy Hippy Shake, a movie about the Oz magazine trial, and photos have circulated of her naked, except for obligatory flowers in her hair. And yet for all the effortful re-creation of the Sixties, one glaring anachronism remains: the Hitler moustache of a Brazilian wax, which marks Miller out as a totally 21st-century girl. Perhaps Hair and Make-up couldn't manage a merkin.

Oh, yeah, I remember those hippies. Remember:

Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy

What was the "there" there, if not... "the ladygarden"? It says everywhere. Could it be any plainer?

Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen

"Waxen" didn't mean you should be waxing your hair off. It meant it was fine for it to be waxy.

Here's the video for the song. You know, I remember when they were filming "Hair" in Central Park, and the call went out for people with a lot of hair to come out and be extras. I considered going — I looked like this around that time — but I was too busy or too aloof or — oh, who knows what I was thinking about in the mid-70s.

Back to the main article:

But then around the mid-90s some mysterious memo went out to twentysomething women that it was no longer sufficient to tidy the “bikini line” so it didn't cascade down the inner thigh like a spider plant.

Oh, yeah, before the mid-90s, you could wear a bikini and reveal pubic hair growing all down your legs! [CORRECTION: Ha, ha. I misread that.]

Let's get the history straight. The bikini hair that caused a stir in the mid-90s was brimming over the top like this — on the cover of The Black Crowes album "Amorica." Even The Black Crowes didn't go for the down to there hair — and neither did anyone in the 70s. Not in a bathing suit anyway.

(Hmmm.... maybe you could in Britain.)

The gyms of Britain were suddenly full of women waxed into weeny welcome mats, with all the stubble, bruises, pimpled hair follicles and burst blood vessels that accompany this excruciating sexifying of the sex.

Like a trend for comedy-size breast implants, inflatable lips, hair extensions, extreme nails and high street daywear revealing more tittage than a ten-quid hooker, waxing filtered down from the porn industry. Here defuzzing makes the action, as it were, easier to follow. And for male performers depilation adds the illusion of an extra inch. Maybe Hitchens had that in mind.

Now, I'm thinking of this banned album cover. (More banned album covers here.)

And don't you love Wikipedia? Check out the luxuriantly detailed article "Merkin." President Merkin Muffley — the (bald) President of the United States in "Dr. Strangelove" — came easily to mind for me. But there's so much more:

The narrator, Humbert Humbert, in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), recalls, "Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl."

Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, says, "He wears a false cunt and merkin of sable both handcrafted...by the notorious Mme. Ophir."...

The 1969 film Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? written by and starring Anthony Newley, is a veritable cornucopia of dirty-joke names. In addition to the two in the title, there's a character (played by Joan Collins), named Polyester Poontang.

Pearl Jam and Neil Young released a two-song companion to Mirror Ball called Merkin Ball....

In an episode of Family Guy, an advertising agent offers Joe Swanson a car, his pants and a merkin so that he will sign up for an advertising contract....

On the 1967 Chess LP The Baroques by the Milwaukee band of the same name, the word "merkin" is heard in the song "Bicycle." The lyric is "...I'll take back the merkin I gave you for Christmas, and you'll be sorry when the wind gets cold, 'cause it'll be hanging from the aerial of my bicycle...."

Lots more at the link.

But what about all that snow?

Flight alert just received via airport WiFi:

NW 247 February 25 ON TIME departs DTW at 7:26 pm arrives MSN 7:41 pm Gate 4

Okay. I'm taking your word for it! Departing Ithaca at 4 pm and hoping not to spend the night in Detroit.

I could have stayed another day in Ithaca. Northwest has some kind of "winter waiver" that lets you change your flight without a penalty. But I have class on Monday, and you don't wuss out about snow when the flights are listed as on time. But there is so much snow!

No snow yet here in Ithaca, where we had fun last night at "cabaret" -- the law school show. Today, we brunched at Mahogony Grill and had some laughs talking about any number of things including the topic "Is America ready for a Satanist President?"

I contemplate whether that's a good topic for my Tuesday NYT column:



We talk about writing, and I go on at some length about that David Foster Wallace essay about Tracy Austin in "Consider the Lobster." John points this out, right above my head:



I say if I was crazy, I'd freak out right now. I'd think I was doomed... or at least destined for a serious encounter with alcohol.

Afterwards, we take a stroll in Ithaca, and someone makes fun of me for half-remembering things. You called Madeline's Marguerite's, and you called the Mahogony Grill the Magnolia Grill, and now you're calling the Commons the Concourse.

We stop to look at a lot of old album covers:



I surreptitiously do some YouTubing... but I'm having some mystifying "file format" problems, so I'll have to add that later.

ADDED:



[Click here if you have trouble playing it in that window.]

UPDATE: I'm now in Detroit and the flight is scheduled to leave on time. I hope to get home soon. Perhaps my car is buried under two feet of snow, but I'm feeling optimistic.

AND: You have the picture above that John took of me. Here's one that I took from the other side of the table:



And John's father Richard Lawrence Cohen was there too. Here's RLC's blog. It's his voice that you mainly hear along with mine on the video clip above, talking about, among other things, the song "Little Boxes."

IN THE COMMENTS: "Of course, it's Badfinger," says Sippican Cottage, who notes a recent comment on a February 7th post that brought up Badfinger and linked to the very picture we're talking about in the video clip. I don't remember clicking on that, and I'm surprised I had a mental image of Badfinger, but rather pleased with myself for having exactly the nugget of information requested on a particular occasion.

"Denny, you know there aren't many who can sing a song the way that you do..."

Goodbye to Denny Doherty.

The Mamas and the Papas, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, were one of the first major rock groups to include both women and men in equal performing roles, with Mr. Doherty, Mr. Phillips, Michelle Phillips and Cass Elliot striking an image of casual, collegiate friendship. In reality, they were a destructive tangle of love affairs, accompanied by plenty of drugs and alcohol.

“It was an untenable situation,” Mr. Doherty said in an interview with The New York Times in 2000. “Cass wanted me, I wanted Michelle, John wanted Michelle, Michelle wanted me, she wanted her freedom. ...”

Everyone loved Denny.

Here's Denny's own telling of the story of the Mamas and the Papas, if you can get to it. (I'm seeing "bandwidth exceeded.")

How well I remember when their first album came out. What an impression it made, including the amazing cover photo:



See the sign superimposed over the toilet. The original photo, with toilet in full view, was considered too scandalous. But we still have the four singers crowded into the bathtub. That's Denny, over in the corner, underneath the beautiful Michelle and the luscious Cass. What an amazing life lay ahead -- we thought -- if those four hippies could get in the bathtub together like that.

And drink out of the same hat:



"The Mamas and the Papas Deliver." What a great album!

Note the continuing theme of shared, water-containing vessels. What did that mean? Like everything else about the Mamas and the Papas, it meant a world of peace, love, and understanding, achieved through communal living and musical harmony.

Back in the real world, those sexual crosscurrents broke up the group. But there were a couple years -- 1966 and 1967 -- when they seemed exactly perfect. I'm sure my life would have been completely different if I had not gazed on those two album covers and heard the songs inside and wildly imagined what these people were singing about:

You gotta go where you wanna go,
Do what you wanna do
With whomever you want to do it, babe

Album cover mayhem.

How can you be so careless with the female form?

"Project Runway." We're reminded that there is no immunity from last week's show, and I'm reminding you that I predicted, based on the excessive Michael-love in last week's edit, that Michael, last week's winner, would be auf'd soon.

No open-toed footwear. That's what Tim says. The designers are driven out to New Jersey, and the scenery flows by like the opening sequence of "The Sopranos." And it's trash! Make an outfit out of trash.

"This is kinda fun for me, cuz I grew up white trash, and my sister and I used to always go dumpster diving. I spent my whole life in the trash can." Says Kayne, quite adorably.

"I let things evolve. I don't own the future. I don't go there. You know what I mean? I just let it come. Let it come. And that's how I work." Says Vincent, and the accompanying plunking bass notes say: he's in trouble. We see him grimacing, and Laura's saying "He's not mentally stable."

Then we see Kayne and Robert talking about how Laura's nuts. And Laura's making a dress that says -- across the ass -- "for nuts only."

Meanwhile, Kayne is making something inexplicable, with stiff, white paper painted with atrocious green flowers. They're all gonna laugh at you.

Michael has made a really cool gold bustier. But that skirt! It seems like a blank canvas.

Ooh, Alison and Tim are talking about how her model is a little large. She's larger than all the other models... Oh, poor Alison! She needs to win so she can auf her model! Have I ever mentioned how much I love Alison. Look at that subtle color, those pleats. And I'm trying not to be swayed by her ultra-sweet appearance. She looks like a woman on an album cover from the 50s that my father would have loved.

And Michael wins again! Cool! Jeffrey comes in second and -- like an idiot -- he expresses his jealousy: Michael won for a "diabetic" outfit. No flavor.

Kayne is spared, and it's between Vincent and Alison. Oh, no, don't take my Alison away!

"There's a fine line between innovation and insanity," Heidi says to Vincent. But Alison, how could you be so careless with the female form. And Alison is out! Oh, no!

Laura freaks about the bad model Alison got stuck with. Shhhh... shhh, Kayne says. Let us enjoy our last moments with Alison.

Strangest thing Bob Dylan said on the new "Theme Time Radio Hour" today.

The theme was: Fathers. Toward the end of the show Bob always reads and answers what he says is an email message he's received. Today, he says: "I got an email from Johnny Depp in France. He asks who was the father of Communism?" Bob answers it's Karl Marx and proceeds to say a few things about Karl Marx's relationship with his own children.

Hey, why pick on dear, sweet Johnny? Is it something about this picture?

Memorable songs from today's show:

The Temptations, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone." What a great song!

The Winstons, "Color Him Father." Really touching lyrics:

My real old man he got killed in the war
And she knows she and seven kids couldn't have got very far
She said she thought that she could never love again
And then there he stood with that big wide grin
He married my mother and he took us in
And now we belong to the man with that big wide grin

Think I'll color this man father
I think I'll color him love

Julie London, "Daddy" ("I want a diamond ring, bracelets, everything..."). Before playing it, Bob quoted the lines "Here's an amazing revelation/With a bit of stimulation/I'd be a great sensation/I'd be your inspiration," and I thought that sounded like sequence of rhymes Bob himself would do. But in fact, Bob has only used one of those four words in a song, and it wasn't at the end of a line.

Julie London song that could have been on today's playlist but wasn't: "My Heart Belongs To Daddy."

My father adored Julie London. Growing up, I was deeply affected by album covers like this:

What am I going to do with all these records?

I've got stacks of things like this from my parents' house:



ADDED: A taste of the liner notes:

Ray Coniff has developed a completely new and refreshing sound in the field of popular music. His sparkling rhythmic treatments, with a vocal chorus used as a section of the orchestra singing syllables rather than words, were one of the freshest new ideas in popular music since the early Forties.

Yes, enough of your damned words. Give me syllables!

And:

Millions of dancers and big-band fans all over the world have been wild about Harry ever since he started blowing his magic horn. This album of exciting new tunes shows why. The swinging danceable beat is there. The Music Makers' characteristic precision and power are there. And, thoughout the album, there is the joy of music making that keeps the sound of Harry's band always fresh and new.

"Fresh" and "new" were big buzzwords back then, apparently. And if you're still wondering Harry the $#@* who?, you have to scour the fine print to find the last name of the man -- Harry James -- who had the insouciance to pose for the album cover in a short-sleeved shirt. Were those hairy arms supposed to serve as a mnemonic device?

Meanwhile, Ray Coniff not only put his last name on the cover, he kept his photograph to a small black and white shot on the back. We get a picture of a nice lady -- sort of an Austin Scarlett look alike -- miming the concept "memories" and modestly swathing her probably not hairy arms in super-fuzzy lavender mohair.

The post-Woodstock Cavett show.

Last night, I watched another episode of "The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons" (a new DVD set). Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Joni Mitchell were there in Cavett's garish studio. Hippie "supergraphics" were painted all over the floor swirling up to little hassocks for the rock stars to perch on or lean against. Woodstock had just ended that morning. We're told Joni skipped Woodstock just to be on the show. Stills proudly points out the "Woodstock mud" on his jeans.

Jefferson Airplane were doing tunes from "Volunteers," including "We Can Be Together." You know:

We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are we are
And we are very proud of ourselves

The song ends with the prescient, Reaganesque repeated line "Tear down the wall." It was fun to see the Airplane in their prime again. I saw them myself a few times around that year, 1969. Maybe you younger readers don't realize how much we adored Grace Slick back in those days. And, I'll tell you, "Surrealistic Pillow" is one of the six album covers I have framed on my living room wall. On the show, Cavett asks Slick about her parents, and she says her mother is a housewife and her father is an investment banker. "All your private property is target for your enemy," indeed.

The other members of the Airplane are nearly catatonic, though Paul Kantner rouses himself at one point and says something either unmemorable or incoherent — I forget. David Crosby is the liveliest person in the group (for whatever reason), and while I'm working on the the theory that he's the smartest rock star in the room — and thinking that's good for Bailey and Beckett — he announces that he has an idea and, beaming with pride, lists the names of six large corporations and advises them to go out of business — as if that would save the world. There's some tedious patter about astrology, including the fact that Crosby is a Leo and looks like a lion.

The best person on the show is Joni Mitchell, who's wearing a bulky green velvet floor-length dress. She sings at least four songs, playing guitar, then piano, and finally going a cappella — for "Fiddle and the Drum":

And so once again
Oh, America my friend
And so once again
You are fighting us all
And when we ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall

Earlier in the show, she'd talked about how she writes about love and that she's a Canadian and Canadians are just not political at all. But she does say she would support Pierre Trudeau, after Cavett asks the assembled icons if any of them would support any political candidate and all the others say no — no one deserves it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Among other things, I'm asked what the other five album covers are. Instead of answering, I give hints. See if you can guess.

Shady grove.

A walk this morning in the UW Arboretum ...



called to mind an old favorite album cover ...



and made me imagine Impressionist figures running around in nineteenth century white dresses like these ...



but there was no one around.

More about the Dave Matthews concert.

The previous post is the main thing I wanted to say about the Dave Matthews Band concert, and this post is a bunch of miscellaneous items based on the big show last night:

1. Dave's harping on peeing in his "register to vote" pitch--see previous post--was quite appropriate for this crowd, because a shocking amount of beer was being drunk by the 40,000 fans crammed onto the big hill that overlooks the stage.

2. When you're sitting on the hill, in the crowd, there are no pathways out to aisles, and the slope is very steep, so getting out to where you can take care of your liquid-related physical needs is quite a challenge.

3. You'd think, in light of the difficulty, that one would buy just one drink and then try to make it through the whole concert, but many of the young men in attendance seemed to see the main problem to be getting back to the concession stands to buy more beer. Now, the beer cups were huge, maybe 32 ounces, so even one was a lot. But, these young men were buying two cups, approximately half a gallon, and carrying them down the steep hill, balancing them on the lawn.

4. What did these men, having drunk so much, do when they had to pee? How did they get up through the crowd, up the steep incline to the bathrooms?

5. Alarming thing I overheard said to the man next to me: "Hey, I don't know you, man, but I'm just trying to look out for you. The people behind you are trying to pee on you."

6. And I don't even want to talk about vomit. I only saw one large pool of vomit.

7. I'll talk about soda. I just bought a Diet Coke. It's a long drive back home after the concert. An hour and a half, not counting the possibly very long time it takes to get out of the parking lot. I want to make the 20 ounce soda last a long time, so I'm dismayed that the young woman who took my $4 also twists off the top and throws it right into the trash. Can't I have my cap? I ask like the Alpine Valley neophyte that I am. No! It's a rule. Why? Because people put stuff in the caps and throw them at the stage. What do they put in the caps? What's the worst thing you might put in a soda cap?

8. I say "parking lot," but it is really fields of grass, where people with flags wave you in and assign you to your spot. There are many, many cars, and lots of people tailgating, with circles of lawn chairs and barbecues and shockingly large piles of empty beer cans. And empty beer bottles, which you can enjoy driving you car tires over as you try to get out later that night, driving around stumbling drunks and cars and trucks driven by those stumbling drunks.

9. And how about the concert? The band put on a good show. I'm not a big fan like Tonya, but I liked the music. However, the physical discomforts far overshadowed the pleasures of the music.

10. Any annoying fans in the crowd worth mentioning?

There was the tall man standing right in front of me in the early part of the evening, who was dressed like a three-year-old (baseball cap, striped polo shirt, shorts, sneakers) and whose ass, which I was forced to look at, twitched, one buttock at a time: his minimal but grotesque way of dancing.

There was the extremely drunk, extremely rubbery young man who danced wildly right in front of us later on in the evening. He groped several women, asked scores of people if they had any pot, and tried to befriend everyone around him by imploring them to dance and party. A favorite move was to turn his back on the stage, stretch out his arms and shout, with a strange, unintended reference to The Who: "Wasted! You're all wasted!" And later: "40,000 people--all wasted!"

There was the young woman who suddenly moved from somewhere out in the crowd to a spot right in front of us and began sobbing uncontrollably. Was she having a bad drug experience? Did she just break up with her boyfriend? Asked "Are you all right?" She said yes and returned to her sobbing. Since she understood the question and responded, I was inclined to think she broke up with her boyfriend.

Then there was the pretty young blond woman who, late in the Dave Matthews set, leaned over to me and said, "You know, you can dance." She went on quite a bit about dancing, noting that Tonya was dancing, and then she grabbed our hands and tried very hard to start a group dance with us. She really wanted to hold hands and dance.

11. Anything else? Back in the stands there was a makeshift "oxygen bar." For $2, you could sit on the floor and lie back against a beanbag cushion with one of those oxygen hoses strapped under your nose and breathe some oxygen, like a hospital patient, for one minute.

12. And speaking of beanbag, out in the parking lot, a favorite activity of the tailgating fans, for some reason, was playing beanbag.

13. Cameras were banned, but my new cell phone is a camera. If I can figure out how to get the photos from the camera to the computer and if anything is any good, I'll have some photos later. Tonya sneaked her whole regular camera in--even though the bags were searched and squeezed--so she'll have some photos later along with her own descriptions of things and I'll link to that here when I can. [ADDED: Here's that link.] And a couple of photos in her camera were taken by me, and, when she sends them to me, I'll put one up here, and you'll see, it will be my second Who reference of the post, an homage to this classic album cover.

AND: The anticipated photo did not work out right. There were four young men lined up facing this chain link fence, all peeing through the fence. I tried to catch the display quickly and some people walked by:



Here's Tonya's picture of the parking field debris:



This wasn't the worst of it at all. Here's the parking field by daylight, showing the tailgating. I particularly like this picture of Tonya's because of the American flag and the luscious display of manly, freckled flesh:



And this shows I wasn't lying about DMB fans playing beanbag:

"You were wrong dissociable brindle." You know it is bad enough that I couldn't sleep at all last night (except for the first three hours), but getting up at four and trying to check email and getting things with subject lines like that really is making me start to dissociate. And perhaps I am a being that is "tawny or grayish with streaks or spots of a darker color." And I'm sure I wrong about a number of things. The Volokh Conspiracy has a Sunday song lyric series, so let me offer the slice of the song lyric that email called to mind for me:

Discorporate & come with me
Shifting; drifting
Cloudless; starless
VELVET VALLEYS & A SAPPHIRE
SEA: Wah Wah

You can read the rest of the lyrics to "Absolutely Free" here. And here you can get the lyrics for all the songs on what is one of the greatest albums of all time "We're Only In It For The Money." It's one of the greatest album covers of all time too, the kind that make you regret CDs came along and eliminated that entire field of art.