One of the Most Profound Scenes I've Ever Seen On Film (1978)

 

I've never known a woman who bought her own house.

Hate to say this as a feminist, but it's true:

My mother got the house after my parents' divorce in the 1970s---the house initially paid for by my dad.

Every single friend that I had in college in the '80s or '90s is now living in a house that her husband paid for. Each husband has a high-paying, high-skilled job, while the wife is either not working at all or doing some sort of low-paying side-job like "Immigration Counselor" or "Chemist" (at her husband's brewery). 

I can't think of one woman I know who bought her own house! Pretty embarrassing for all of us ladies!

Andy Griffith + Joanna Moore: "Down in the Valley"

 I've posted this before, but I post again because the song itself is so pretty, 
and Moore and Griffith sing it so well together. 

And because of what ultimately happened with Joanna Moore's life.

Moore appeared in several episodes of "The Andy Griffith Show" as his love interest 
right before she married Ryan O'Neal in 1963. 
(I'm not a huge "Andy Griffith Show" aficionado online, but: 
No one likes the later "Helen Crump" and everyone likes Moore's "Peggy.")

Some accounts say Moore was sleeping with Griffith. (Which I'm sure O'Neal didn't like.) 
Moore also appeared in a 1962 Elvis movie ("Follow That Dream") and, according to reports,
slept with Elvis and then later tried to break down his door when he wouldn't respond to her.

She was married to Ryan O'Neal from 1963-1967.

She had a big drug/alcohol problem, but continued to work steadily in TV up until 1976 or so.
She died in 1997, age 63, of lung cancer, after being supported for years by her daughter, 
Tatum O'Neal, who was with her when she died.

Watching this beautiful song in 1962: How could anything bad ever happen??
 

Bay City Rollers: It's a Game (1977)

 

Summer o' 1977 (6 weeks in Germany)

 "Lay Back in the Arms of Someone" was big in Germany. 
Walking around, drunken young men on city streets were bellowing Smokie lyrics.
The Bay City Rollers had also just released their "It's a Game" album, 
which was also a very big deal.

"Country Roads" in Berlin (2025, NFL Football Game)

The Germans are a people, and they have a music that they like----

And it AIN'T hip-hop.

(Does anyone except shallow left-wing boy-writers in the US still like hip-hop?)

 

"Country Roads" English Pub Fans After Soccer Loss (2024)

 The English are a people, and they have a music that they brought over to the US. 
And it AIN'T hip-hop.

 

Crowd sings "Country Roads" post US/Australia World Cup game in Seattle

 

US National Anthem at US/Australia World Cup Game

Wow---I'm somehow sadly "grateful" that the players did not kneel. THANK YOU for representing your country! 

Though---why is 95% of the US soccer team black? Blacks are only about 13% of the US population. Same question for all of the Western Euro teams. Germany, England, Denmark---the teams are now primarily African, not European. 

No, Africans are not "better athletes"---the above Euro teams have won multiple World Cup championships with their own indigenous people.

Conversely: Most African teams at this 2026 World cup are 95% African; most Middle Eastern teams are 95% Middle Eastern; most Eastern Euro teams are 95% Caucasian. (South Americans mainly Hispanic, except for Brazil, which has long been mixed.) 

Do I need to ask what happened in US/Western Europe/Canada/et al since 2016? And the countries' leftist leadership led to DEI hiring, even among soccer players. For shame.

 

XTC: Dear God (1988)

Back when I first heard this XTC song in 1988, when I was 23---I was knocked out. "Things are so unfair! Why, God, why?? You must NOT be real!" This is how I'd been thinking since I first heard about God when I was a child: If he doesn't answer your prayers, he must not be real.

As I got older, I realized that all of humanity and its behavior was/is a test. The crucifixion of Jesus came about because the Jews failed to protect him against the Roman laws of the time. The Romans gave the Jews a choice of who to sacrifice. Had the Jewish leaders been brave enough, they would NOT have given up Jesus. Psychologically sick on the part of the Romans---they should have just let him go. But they decided to play a game: Since Jesus is the King of the Jews, who will the Jewish leaders pick to execute? And the weak Jewish leaders caved, and turned over Jesus instead of some common punks.

If there is a God testing humanity: Humans failed at this important crux. XTC didn't understand, intellectually, what was going on.

Dear God, hope you got the letter
And I pray you can make it better
Down here
I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer
But all the people that you made in your image
See them starving on their feet
'Cause they don't get enough to eat
From God
I can't believe in you

Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but I feel
That I should be heard loud and clear
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears
And all the people that you made in your image,
See them fighting in the street
'Cause they can't make opinions meet
About God
I can't believe in you

Did you make disease, and the diamond blue?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too!

Dear God, don't know if you noticed
But your name is on a lot of quotes in this book
Us crazy humans wrote it
You should take a look
And all the people that you made in your image
Still believing that junk is true
Well I know it ain't, so do you,
Dear God
I can't believe in
I don't believe in

I won't believe in heaven and hell
No saints, no sinners, no devil as well
No pearly gates, no thorny crown
You're always letting us humans down

The wars you bring, the babes you drown
Those lost at sea and never found
And it's the same the whole world 'round
The hurt I see helps to compound
That Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Is just somebody's unholy hoax

And if you're up there you perceive
That my heart's here upon my sleeve
If there's one thing I don't believe in
It's you
Dear God

My First Album, The First Song on Side One (1976)

The Skunks: Earthquake Shake (1979)

Jesse Sublett, Austin, Texas

 

Voyager left Earth in 1977. The "pale blue dot" is us in 1990, as seen from Voyager, 13 years away.

Books/vids ordered in the past 2 weeks

 

Music ordered in the past 2 weeks

Imagine a world constructed by Lead Belly, Guthrie, and Glenn Gould----

We'd all be driven insane with the ongoing horror-combo of 

murder/Commie dogma/total OCD.

Thanks, Belinda, for only having a coke habit!

 

Glenn Gould on Beethoven's Sonata No. 17 (1967)

 

Glenn Gould: Bach's Goldberg Variations (broadcast 1964, CBC)

 

Via the Criterion Channel, I finally watched "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould," 
which I'd been hearing about since it came out in 1993. 
It's "clever" (though star Colm Feore does not manage to channel the real Gould at all), 

but this film did what I think it was supposed to do:
Made me go learn more about the real Glenn Gould!

Belinda Carlisle (Leave a Light On---TOTP, 1989)

Belinda Carlisle covers Cream's "I Feel Free" (1987)

 

Belinda Carlisle: Circle in the Sand (1987)

 

You're up by 29 in the 3rd quarter...

And you're still up by 15 in the 4th. And then the Spurs absolutely blew it. (No, I'm not going to post any video---it's too horrible to watch!) I actually felt sick after last night's game, and I still feel sick the morning after. And I made myself watch all of the idiotic ESPN shows with Stephen A. Smith to make myself feel even worse. 

My god, what a nationally televised CHOKE by my team.

Sleater-Kinney: Modern Girl (2015)

 Carrie Brownstein is "sorta" my Dream Woman.
She's exceptionally drily/absurdly funny in "Portlandia." (As is her cohort, Fred Armisen.)

And I like her intelligence in personal interviews and in her song-writing.
But... I just don't like the bulk of her Sleater-Kinney music that much. 

This song and performance, though, are GREAT!
 

Spurs now down 2-0 against Knicks in Finals... (But some droll intro music!)

Very deflating to lose Game 2 tonight. (And first 2 games were both in San Antonio. We lost both. Not confident that we'll fare particularly well at Madison Square Garden for the next 2 games!)

But I must say, I did get a kick out of the fruity piccolo (flute? I can't tell) music the Spurs auditorium used to introduce the Knicks players before each of the first 2 games! 

It's usually a "thing" where the home announcer uses an intentionally-very-flat tone of voice to announce the opposing players, then amps everything up when announcing the home players. 

But this intro, with the piccolo/flute (played at intro of both games), was, I thought, especially humorous! 

(When I went to other sports sites online, though, turns out Knicks fans were not so amused!) 

The Go-Gos on Berlin TV (1982)

 

The Go-Gos in Central Park (2001): Head Over Heels

 

The Go-Gos in Central Park (2001): I Wanna Be Sedated

 Back to their punk roots!

My Current 48-inch TV + My Past 12-inch Experiences

While watching Game 1 of the Spurs vs Knicks game on my 48-inch color TV, I'm reminded of many past TV memories:

(1) In 1972 or so, my family had had a black-and-white console for all of my life. (I was 7 at that time.) One day, some strange men came in take it away. My mom and dad pretended that TV was going away forever---and so I cried. But, as it turned out, they'd actually just ordered a color TV replacement.

(2) In 1976, "Gone With The Wind" was shown for the first time on national television. At this time, I had a small 12-inch B/W TV in my bedroom. My dad acted like he didn't want to watch GWTW with me and my mom, so he retreated to my bedroom, ostensibly to watch sports or something. But when I went back there to visit him... he was also watching GWTW! :)

(3) In 1977, early evening, I was 12 and lying on my bed and watching my small TV while also reading. My dad came into my room and demanded to know what I was doing. He didn't seem to understand how one could possibly have the TV on while simultaneously reading. He demanded that I immediately stop reading (!). Yeah, whatever. I didn't stop reading. But he came back into my room a few minutes later. When he saw my book still open and the TV still on, he then dragged me by my hair down the hallway and threw me into the living room. (This was still in the early evening, and what was most embarrassing to me was that a neighbor kid happened to ring the door-bell at the time, and probably got to hear some of my shrieking. Sad that what the neighbor-kid thought was the most of my worries.)

(4) After my parents were (thankfully) divorced, I used to surreptitiously watch movies late into the night on my tiny TV. My mom was strict, so I'd stuff a towel under the door to block any light flickering. One night that I've remembered forever: "Wild in the Streets" and "Song of Bernadette." (There was another film in there, but I can't remember it.) At the end of the night, the sun was coming up. The first time that I'd EVER stayed up all night, along with my first-time realization that there was nothing so mysterious about "the night."

(5) While in college in the early '80s: Still all I had was a very small 12-inch B/W TV (up until about 1986, when I think I advanced to 18 inches). At one point, VHS videos were a relatively new thing. Some video stores allowed you to rent a machine along with your videos. I rented a machine once, when I was trying to entertain a friend (we watched "The Shining"). And when I wanted to watch older films that I hadn't seen before: I went to the college library, which allowed you to check out films and sit in a small room and watch them. (How I first saw "Grand Hotel" and "Anna Christie," for instance---I was a serious young thing.)

Lengthy Interview with Andy Griffith (1959)