"Egypt's musicians' union has banned a leading singer from performing in the country for 'mocking' the River Nile."

"It came after video emerged showing Sherine Abdel Wahab being asked at a concert to sing Mashrebtesh Men Nilha (Have You Ever Drunk From The Nile). She responded by saying 'drinking from the Nile will get me schistosomiasis' - a disease caused by parasitic worms that is commonly known as bilharzia. Abdel Wahab then advised the fan to 'drink Evian water' instead. On Tuesday, the Egyptian Musicians Syndicate announced that it had reviewed the video and decided to suspend the 37 year old over her apparent 'unjustified mockery of our dear Egypt.'"

BBC reports.

I tried unsuccessfully to find the lyrics to the song. (Does it profess some deep, quasi-religious love for Egypt?) But I found this video, which went up in 2007 and which has comments about "Sherine" — "Queen Sherine," "I love Sherine and Egypt"...



... so I'm assuming the singer is the same woman who's now being punished, apparently punished for making fun of the lyrics of her own song or perhaps expressing some genuine concern that the song's metaphor is taken literally by some people and causing a very serious disease.

ADDED: This story made me think about "The Velvet Underground — Live at Max's Kansas City," a record I've listened to enough to have engraved on my brain the reaction to the crowd's clamoring to hear a particular song that the singer rejected as encouraging a bad health problem. The concertgoers want to hear what was one of the Velvet Underground's greatest songs, and Lou Reed said: “We don’t play ‘Heroin’ anymore.” From a longer report of the incident:

Lou Reed is on the stage at Max's listening to the audience shout their requests. "Heroin . . . Heroin . . . Yeah, Heroin." Lou answers in a real flat, magnificent "fuck you" tone, "We don't play Heroin anymore." Big deal. So what if Lou Reed refuses a request? But listen to his voice on Live at Max's, his tone. He's not only saying that he doesn't want to play the tune. He's dissing the guy who requested the song. Why would Reed do this? Granted, the Underground stopped playing "Heroin" when people came up to them saying things like "My brother died because he took heroin when listening to your album."...  It's almost as if Reed's answer shares the complex, obscure attitude of the "I-wear-black-and-thus-must-be-hipper-than-thou" syndrome. He's got his eyes shut and his mind made up: if the guy in the audience doesn't know about Heroin, then he's not up to my level. Reed has changed so much, while always maintaining his title as the infamous "engaging character."

Don't do heroin and don't drink river water. Health alerts from pop stars. They are not perfectly well received. We look to the artists for metaphor and mystery.



I don't know just where I'm going/But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can/Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man....

How LSD made Jerry Hall a model.

An excerpt from her autobiography that I'm highlighting instead of all the junk about Mick Jagger:

The idea of being a model started when I was invited to a party. A boy gave me LSD without telling me what it was. I locked myself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out, not knowing what was happening to me.

All I remember is looking in the mirror and thinking: ‘You’re really beautiful. You should be a model.’

She was 16 and 6 feet tall. I can't believe it took LSD to give her the idea of becoming a model. She was 6 feet tall! But anyway... I do believe that, given LSD and a mirror, she had a fine time staring at herself and reveling in her beauty. I don't quite believe that the idea of monetizing the beauty arrived psychedelically.

Oh, I can't resist dragging Mick into this blog post. I just love this sentence: "One evening in New York, I found myself sitting between Mick and Warren Beatty at a dinner party." I just found myself... Yeah, how does stuff like that happen?La la la... there you are, minding your own business, and suddenly — hey, here I am sitting between Mick Jagger and Warren Beatty!

Mick had told me he took LSD every day for a year in the Sixties. He also admitted he was smoking heroin. I was disgusted.

LSD every day, eh? Is that even possible? Did he stare in the mirror and decide he was gorgeous? Imagine yourself as Mick Jagger on LSD and staring into the mirror: What is that experience like? Feel free to answer that question via Photoshop.

This is good too: "He wasn’t nearly as rich as people thought... We bought homes in New York, London, Paris and Mustique...."

"People who use heroin, they have the image of losers. They have the image of... junkies."

It's not fashionable anymore to be a heroin addict, so why not dispense it, legally, at a clinic?

"The NYT Should Embrace Their Inner Heroin Dealer."

Do you hear that, New York Times?

"If you want to find out if someone's really a libertarian, ask him: Do you think children should be allowed to buy heroin from vending machines?"

"A real libertarian will answer: Only if the vending machines are privately owned."

James Taranto retells an old joke (and then lambastes Ron Paul).

"This old girl is Layla?... This is the face that launched a thousand trips?"

The reviewer of Eric Clapton's autobiography begins with a personal account of seeing Clapton's (and George Harrison's) ex-wife Pattie Boyd in a restaurant:

The famous Pattie Boyd was like somebody's utterly conventional British aunt, somebody you would find permanently planted at the end of the bar in a pub in the Home Counties, perhaps after a cricket match, ciggie and cocktail in hand....

Well, now that Eric Clapton has written a confessional memoir, all has become clear. During their marriage, the long-suffering Pattie spent most of her time patrolling pubs with Clapton, then cleaning up his drunken messes at home.

That is, when she wasn't walking in on the guitar hero and his errant girlfriends or listening to him recount his most recent conquests on the road. Small wonder the poor woman looked a little faded that day in L.A. It's tough work playing nursemaid to a junkie drunk womanizer.

Of course. It's obvious. Yet somehow we were all so jealous of her. I listened to the audio version of Pattie Boyd's memoir "Wonderful Tonight" yesterday as I took a long walk. She was so lucky, so exactly where everything was happening, where we all longed to be, and yet it was horrible. She recounts the ordeal sweetly and says more than once that she wouldn't change a thing, but it's such a sad story.

... Clapton was withdrawn and surly, a blues purist, despising the Beatles as a "bunch of wankers."...

By 1970, he had become obsessed with Pattie Boyd. "I coveted Pattie," he writes, "because she belonged to a powerful man who seemed to have everything I wanted - amazing cars, an incredible career, and a beautiful wife." When he couldn't have Boyd immediately, inspired by Charlie Parker and Ray Charles, Clapton turned to heroin, spending thousands a week on his habit.

Finally, his manager produced Boyd for Clapton, as a kind of deal perk. Once he had her, naturally he didn't want her, racking up scores of one-night stands on the road and ignoring her when he came home....

By 1981,... Boyd was locking him in his bedroom so he wouldn't spoil Christmas for family and friends with his drunken antics.

Painful. Anyway, what does Pattie Boyd look like now? Like this, at age 63. More:

"It is with a great amount of shame that I stand before you and tell you I have betrayed your trust."

How painful to see the destruction of a heroine. Marion Jones — winner of 3 Olympic gold medals — has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators and admitted about taking steroids.

"I'm just grooving on drugs and the song 'A Horse With No Name.'"

Said by me, from the dentist chair this morning, under the influence of piped-in music and piped-in nitrous oxide. The dentist informs me that the "horse" in the song was heroin, and that she's always liked the song. "Ugh, I've always hated it," I say, through multiple dental instruments. "The song. And heroin."

ADDED: But I've always liked the song "Heroin."

My brain as a hypodermic needle. Your brain as an international airport.

A new book:

[W]omen talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man.

Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat - and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests....

In The Female Mind, Dr Luan Brizendine says women devote more brain cells to talking than men.

And, if that wasn't enough, the simple act of talking triggers a flood of brain chemicals which give women a rush similar to that felt by heroin addicts when they get a high....

But what the male brain may lack in converstation and emotion, they more than make up with in their ability to think about sex.

Dr Brizendine says the brain's "sex processor" - the areas responsible for sexual thoughts - is twice as big as in men than in women, perhaps explaining why men are stereotyped as having sex on the mind.

Or, to put it another way, men have an international airport for dealing with thoughts about sex, "where women have an airfield nearby that lands small and private planes".

I love when a book explains supposedly scientific information in language that approximates that Prince song "International Lover."

ADDED: Mark Liberman notes that the book is actually called "The Female Brain" and indicates that the book is more substantial than the linked Daily Mail piece makes it look.

"And I feel just like Jesus' son."

No, this post isn't about "The Da Vinci Code." It's a nice found video of Lou Reed singing "Heroin," back in 1972, with John Cale playing the electric viola. (Via Boing Boing.) And then Nico sings "Femme Fatale." She's got brown hair here, and she's somewhere along the way in her stupendous decline.

"The darkness at the center" of every book about the Beatles.

John Lennon.

[Beatles biographer Bob Spitz] hits the Lennon-as-drug-addled-emotional-cripple note with jarring frequency, a riff that often obscures the bad-boy rock expressionist's outright genius—just listen to a bootleg of the "Strawberry Fields Forever" demos recorded only weeks prior to what Spitz calls Lennon's "apogee of drug taking and self-abuse."

Here's the Spitz book on Amazon, open to the Search Inside function. Find something interesting and post it in the comments. I found this on page 336, describing the recording of "Come Together":

"Shoot me!" The taunt was indicative of the way John was feeling at the time. If Yoko helped reinforce his contempt for Paul, the heroin made their differences more irrational. Convinced that Paul was stealing his thunder, if not his soul, John fought his resentment with numbness.

Not really that well written, is it? "Convinced that Paul was stealing his thunder, if not his soul" is awfully bad.

Note: "Spitz" should not count as bodily-fluids blogging. Or should it?

That gives me an idea. Hmmm.... No references to semen or pus in the entire book! There is blood, though:

[M]uch of [Yoko Ono's book] Grapefruit [John] found infuriating, scattered with outrageous instructional “pieces,” such as “Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.” John, who loved nothing more than to whip up controversy, saw in Yoko a kindred spirit. She refused to play by anyone's rules. Yes, there was the "avant-garde crap" she perpetrated as art, but she was unlike any woman he'd ever met, a real challenge to figure out. She excited him.

Ten things I've never done.

Yesterday, I linked to RLC's list of 10 things about himself, and Tonya, in the comments, said I should write 10 things about myself. For some reason, I didn't find that immediately appealing, but it popped into my head to write a list of ten things I've never done.

I've never:

1. Gone camping.

2. Eaten egg salad, devilled eggs, or cold hard-boiled eggs.

3. Gone skiing.

4. Set foot on any continent other than North America and Europe.

5. Shoplifted.

6. Watched a pornographic movie -- other than in federal court, as part of a forfeiture proceeding.

7. Called anyone "sir" or "ma'am."

8. Used a computer that wasn't a Macintosh (unless you count things like dedicated LEXIS consoles and ATM machines as computers).

9. Seen the movie "Apocalypse, Now." (It was always "Apocalypse," later, for me, and now maybe it's "Apocalypse," never. )

10. Used cocaine or heroin.

UPDATE: Steven Taylor accepts my meme here. And, wow, it's amazing what he's never done. Never gone to New York City? And Stephen Bainbridge joins in here. Two of his are wine-related.

"When I Was Cool." I had to drive from Chicago back home to Madison today, and I was glad to turn on the car radio to find the very beginning of a Fresh Air interview with Sam Kashner about his book "When I Was Cool," which I've been reading--along with a bunch of other things--for the past month. The interview got me half the way home and was just great, with Kashner telling the story of being enamoured of the beatniks, going to study at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, and then finding them all old men, somewhat addled and shambling, and himself not quite so much a student as an apprentice.



Ah! Too bad there weren't video cameras everywhere, because that could be the perfect reality show, combining The Apprentice and The Osbournes!

You can listen to the show here today, and click on the archive after today. Memorable revelations from the interview:

1. William Burroughs said he would never have been a heroin addict if he had realized how badly constipated it would make him when he got to be an old man.

2. Allen Ginsberg made a pass at Kashner and, after Kashner declined, started to find Kashner's poetry terrible. Kashner is still angry ... about the poetry critiques.

3. Ginsberg's guru ordered him to shave off his beard because he was too attached to it--and he did!

4. Kashner's first assignment was to finish one of Ginsberg's poems and when it turned out to be a poem about having sex with Neal Cassady, Kashner went to the Boulder Public Library to ask for information!

5. It was Kashner's job to do Ginsberg's laundry, and the method he used was to ship the dirty laundry in a box home to his mother. She did the laundry and shipped it back!

Oh, listen to the interview. And read the book.