This week I'll be firming up a day and time for a new early-week quiz at a cool food-serving location in Northern Liberties. You will be updated as I have news to impart. Hooray!
The West Philly quiz didn't pan out. I was told that I was one of 100 (?!) people being interviewed, and being "the most together" person they interviewed actually hurt me. Apparently the bar was looking for "oddball amateurs" without "strong personalities" that might "jeopardize the brand we've worked hard to create." This at a bar that hasn't been open for a year.
Even having a format and answer sheet already hurt me, as they had a "branded" answer sheet, although it wasn't clear to me that anyone realized that the sheet would dictate a format.
Once again someone gets an MBA or a marketing degree and ruins another little corner of the world as a result. On the plus side, strangers didn't think I was "oddball" and/or "amateur." I'll take it.
If the image is confusing, by all means check out this post on poissons d'avril.
Wednesday, April 1, 7:30pm 12 Steps Down 9th & Christian Sts. Subject Round: FOOLS Wednesday, April 1, ~10pm Ray's Happy Birthday Bar 1200 E. Passyunk Ave. (near 9th & Federal Sts.) Subject Round: FOOLS, PART DEUX Thursday, April 2, 8:30pm The Draught Horse 1431 Cecil B. Moore Ave. (Temple University campus, near Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.) Subject Round: SCI-FI (REALLY THIS TIME, I MEAN IT)
Wednesday, April 8, ~10 pm Ray's Happy Birthday Bar 1200 E. Passyunk Ave.(near 9th & Federal Sts.) Subject Round: SECOND ANNUAL ALL-BASEBALL SPECTACULAR
Six rounds of baseball questions, the sport and references in pop culture. Baseball prizes available as well!
Gofa Wingdom came out to both quizzes Wednesday night and did a lot to rectify the scoring doldrums of late. They won at 12 Steps Down with a 151 after hanging in third place or less most of the night, then blew ahead in the final round. Then they were one of a couple of teams to head over to Ray's Happy Birthday Bar immediately after and won handily with a 176.
This is just on question out of the 180s and Top Ten list territory. I'll point out that the winning score at the lawyers' event I did last week was a 55 (two digits, no typo).
This ad in Philadelphia's Craigslist is only unintentionally funny.
I actually felt compelled to write the guy to let him know that "comedians" generally, y'know, generate their own humor.
I also let him know that if he got a paid gig, I'd be happy to pay someone $0.25-$5.00 to heckle him, "depending on length of routine." I'll let you all know if I get a response. Maybe he'll pay someone to respond to me..?
Tuesday, March 24, 6:30pm Cira Center Philadelphia Diversity Law Group This one's invite only, sorry gang.
Wednesday, March 25, 7:30pm 12 Steps Down 9th & Christian Sts. Subject Round: FOREIGN FILM
Wednesday, March 25, ~10 pm Ray's Happy Birthday Bar 1200 E. Passyunk Ave.(near 9th & Federal Sts.) Subject Round: COMEDIANS Thursday, March 26, 8:45 pm The Draught Horse 1431 Cecil B. Moore Ave. (Temple University campus, near Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.) Subject Round: SCI-FI
Wednesday, March 18, 7:30pm 12 Steps Down 9th & Christian Sts. Subject Round: CHEESE
Wednesday, March 18, ~10 pm Ray's Happy Birthday Bar 1200 E. Passyunk Ave.(near 9th & Federal Sts.) Subject Round: WINE Note the time change; we're now deliberately making this "the late quiz" as that seems to work better for some odd reason.
Thursday, March 19, 8:45 pm The Draught Horse 1431 Cecil B. Moore Ave. (Temple University campus, near Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.) Subject Round: FLAGS The quiz returns this week; Temple basketball plays Friday afternoon.
Wednesday, March 11, 7:30pm 12 Steps Down 9th & Christian Sts. Subject Round: BEERS OF THE WORLD Also at this quiz - meet a brewer and sample some microbrew at 12 Steps Down as part of Beer Week! Wednesday, March 11, ~10 pm Ray's Happy Birthday Bar 1200 E. Passyunk Ave.(near 9th & Federal Sts.) Subject Round: BEERS OF THE WORLD II Note the time change; we're now deliberately making this "the late quiz" as that seems to work better for some odd reason. The Draught Horse 1431 Cecil B. Moore Ave. (Temple University campus, near Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.) No quiz this week - Temple basketball home games followed by Spring break - quiz returns March 19. Hey - where's that party invite the law students said was coming?!
I don't always remember to bring the camera, then I don't always remember to use it when I do. And then I get behind on site updates and nothing happens with the photos in any event. Sigh...
These people won games at various venues over the past several weeks. You know who you are, and now the world can see your victory.
You know what hasn't happened in a very long time? No one has made any movement on the Top Ten scores list. Lil' Roy, your 189 point wonders and former Dirty Frank's regulars, have won the past two weeks running at 12 Steps Down with scores as high as 152, but no one's even topped 160 in a while, let alone scraped the 180 mark. Is the quiz harder than it used to be, or is this simply an artifact of the top three teams playing very rarely these days?
The appetizing family entertainment depicted above is Judith Beheading Holofernes, an episode from the Bible, which is a book adults use to teach children morality. (Many of these same adults protest Harry Potter as a bad influence, although I fail to recall a title like Harry Potter and the Righteous Beheading.) It was painted by the great Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the subject of a question in last week's 12 Steps Down quiz which elicited a bit of controversy.
I asked what school of painting was Caravaggio most closely associated with, and most teams went with chiaroscuro, which I marked wrong. I could just point out that chiaroscuro is more a technique than a school, rest on semantics like a petulant bastard and call it a day, but instead I'll dig deeper as promised last week and come up with a more satisfying reason why that was the right call, all the while carefully ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
(That PayPal link on the lower right-hand side of the page really works by the by, and if you're so moved by my dedication to Gnosis in all its forms on this site and beyond, feel free to toss me a few bucks.)
"Chiaroscuro is a method for applying value to a two-dimensional piece of artwork to create the illusion of a three-dimensional solid form. This way of working was devised during the Italian Renaissance and was used by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. In this system, if light is coming in from one predetermined direction, then light and shadow will conform to a set of rules." So says the art department at the University of Evansville, and who am I to contradict them?
All well and good. Now, as for Tenebrism: "A heightened form of chiaroscuro, it creates the look of figures emerging from the dark." According to Wikipedia, which is about as far deep as I'm willing to dig on this one: "The difference between tenebrism and chiaroscuro is perhaps best expressed by [dead German art critic] Rudolf Wittkower,"With Caravaggio light isolates; it creates neither space nor atmosphere. Darkness in his pictures is something negative; darkness is where light is not, and it is for this reason that light strikes upon his figures and objects as upon solid, impenetrable forms, and does not dissolve them, as happens in the work of Titian, Tinoretto and Rembrandt."
Thus a case for one being such a specialized form of the other as to be a different thing in its own right.
The 6 points would not have made a difference incidentally; all the top teams had the same answer.
Here it is, folks, your second installment of excellent sounds from out of the vaults. Rarer than rare for those who know not, better sounding than I can possibly describe, and free. Enjoy!
1) The Black Pope?! Not the head Jesuit, but this guy, tapes of whom have been circulating for decades: "In the early '70s a chappie calling himself The Black Pope hired himself out to diverse Texas/Louisiana radio stations. Like a fearsome gunslinger, the Pope would blow into Beaumont or New Orleans with contests like "Wear Out Your Favorite Dee Jay's Head," always warning people not to call him a dee jay.
"I been up and down the dial an' I ain't heard nothin' but a bunch of rootypoots!"... soon The Black Pope had everyone tuning him in. But the man was so egomaniacal that after a month, his ravings began to fry brains. He'd be shitcanned, forced to holster his rap, wander off to another town and save another station. Thus are legends born."
2) There were three '60s psych bands called Kaleidoscope so far as I know, one each in the US, Britain and Mexico, and against all odds all three were fantastic. This track is from the US band, recorded with soul greats Larry Williams and Johnny "Guitar" Watson, an awesome mix of psych and soul that works.
3) Here's Brazilian tropicalia queen Gal Costa channeling the North African Tuareg people from her trippy 1969 self-titled album.
4) "Tinkerbell's mind is a crazy machine at the best." Britain, early '70s, Glitterhouse.
5) Erkin Koray is sort of the Turkish Elvis meets Jimi Hendrix. The Turkish rock scene grew out of a series of mid-'60s band competitions held by Istanbul newspapers which required covers of Turkish or Kurdish folk songs. Fortunately for the world this led to a series of mindblowing eastern takes on hard rock once the Led Zep cassettes started getting passed around. This is from 1973.
6) This Dave Miller Set tune is a great piece of Down Under psych about the Gunpowder Plot, of all things.
7) This Aardvarks rocker is from 1966 and appeared on Volume 11 of the '80s Pebbles compilations, almost all of which I own on vinyl, which is as close to a sense of accomplishment as some of us get.
8) "The Hobo" is by a band called The Good Rats, according to my source 1966 but this seems a bit ahead of the prevailing songwriting curve by a year or two... who knows. I know nothing about the band, other than that they are the second mammalian group in a row on this comp.
9) Dreamseller is an awesome 1969 album by October Cherries, who were from Singapore. Yes, Singapore. Yes, 1969. This could easily have been a McCartney composition on Sgt. Pepper. And you thought you knew Singapore!
10) A few years ago I was in a crappy neighborhood of Lima, Peru called Victoria (if memory serves), waiting for a bus into the Andes. Portions of my life read like the J. Peterman catalog, a topic for another day. There were some cassette and CD stalls near the (ahem) "station" and I asked around in my bad Spanish for any old Peruvian rock music. Pay dirt was struck when one guy had a bootleg CD of the mighty Traffic Sound, a semi-legendary psych band I'd heard of and was specifically hoping to find something by on the trip. The top track of theirs on said CD would have to be "Virgin", which in the bridge actually draws heavily from traditional Andean musical culture and drops my jaw in so doing. Behold the godhead!
11) Tartarex is actually a chemical which is used to remove tannic acid. For a German band called The Petards (as in "hoist by...") 40 years ago, however...
"Tartarex was the so called Rex Temporis, or if you prefer: “King of Time”. He lived at my side from 112 a.C. until 1962. Then he left. Left me standing in the eager sea of time trying to hold my share of sand grains in the hand. But I realize I won`t be able to save even one golden grain."
12) The Rattles were an awesome German band who had some commercial success in Europe around 1970. This track seems to have everything improbably mixed up front, and is quite the monster.
13) Most of what little I've pulled off the web of Cindy und Bert is early '70s German lite pop/Schlager schmaltz that we're better off without. This is precisely what makes the hard-charging, organ-heavy Black Sabbath cover with a lyric about Sherlock Holmes' demonic dog nemesis that much better - completely out of left field!
14) Danny McCulloch was the bassist of Eric Burdon & The Animals and released this prescient rocker of a track about not being able to smoke anywhere 40 years ago.
15) Dave Grusin is known as a smooth jazz artist and respected Hollywood soundtrack writer. Forget that for a second. Just for the moment, know that Grusin worked with The Byrds to concoct a psych soundtrack for one of the best movies you could ever watch with friends and drink to - Candy. Looking over that negative New York Times review gives you no idea of what exactly the movie is. Would it help to say that some of Hollywood's finest talent came together to drop acid and make a movie about an alien sex goddess (portrayed by Ewa Aulin, a recent Miss Teen Sweden) sent to Earth to enourage us to, as best as I can make out, drop acid and make a movie about an alien sex goddess? I swear I am not making this up. The soundtrack rocks, too. Rent it!
16) San Francisco's Crime should have been huge. The futuristic proto-punk band even had an awesome cops and robbers look down pat. "Maserati" is my fave song of theirs, from a 1980 single.
17) The next three punk tracks have a mini-theme going, and you should hide the children. Elton Motello was a pivotal fellow in the early Belgian New Wave/punk scene, which is not a bad accomplishment for a British guy. "Jet Boy..." had its vocal track re-recorded with a French lyric unrelated to the original and became the international smash hit "Ça plane pour moi." Aren't you glad you now know that the original is completely depraved?
18) VKTMS were an awesome early San Francisco punk band who should also have been millionaires in a just world. "Midget" is about the punkest song imaginable. Once upon a time I had this on a 7", which is worth well over $100 now. What did I do with it?!
19) La Peste (yes, a reference to Camus' The Plague) were the best pre-hardcore Boston band, and this 1979 effort is the catchiest song I've heard by this strong band. Too bad singing along to this at work will get you fired, sued and arrested. In recent years demo tapes of their songs which never made it to vinyl have surfaced, worth a Google!
20) The standard narrative has hardcore punk splitting off into its own ghetto in about 1980, led by Black Flag, Bad Brains and one little-heard 1979 7" from The Middle Class, an obscure SoCal band. What to make of this 1978 (!) madness from Swiss (?!) art punk-freak Dieter Meier, years ahead of his time?
21) The Dickies got screwed. The L.A. band were the great-great-grandfathers of bands like Green Day, only with far more talent and personality. It never paid off in full, the world hating the trailblazer while trails are blazed. Florida's East Coast equivalent The Eat soldiered on into the mid-'80s and didn't even get what little The Dickies got in the way of recognition. "Communist Radio" sounds to be a live track - there was a slower, different arrangement on their full-length cassette-only release from about 1984 which is also strong. Another band that should have been huge, and likely never played to more than 100 (largely confused) people.
22) A song called "Assface" has no business being this catchy. New Hampshire's G.G. Allin was famous for naked sado-masochistic performances which often culminated in him letting loose on the audience from the massive amount of Ex-Lax he'd consume before shows. Allin claimed he was going to kill himself on stage during a Halloween show in 1993, but died of an overdose after a show before that could happen. If you like Eric Cartman, you'll love GG Allin. What's funny is how good the early releases are! I mean, if John Tesh is going to shove a mic up his bum between songs, tix will sell no matter how much he bores you musically, so it's a bonus that this act was churning out something hum-able on top of the schtick.
23) "Alles geht weiter" ("Everything Keeps Going" by my reckoning) by Torpedo Moskau is an example of the sort of mid-'80s tuneful punk Europe churned out in force. The song appears on the above-average Life Is a Joke, Vol. 2 pan-European compilation which I think came out of Germany in 1986. I know of no Vol. 1, which has internal logic.
24) In 1987 I was working on an irregular punk zine and solicited some music to review. One of the few bands to send me vinyl was Arizona's Sun City Girls, who responded with what I know now was their third LP. These guys weren't girls, and weren't family entertainment to put it mildly. "Pornoshop" is one of the least offensive songs on the album, a scatalogical Fugs-style take on Ed Meese's porn commission, McDonald's and the San Ysidro massacre, all as a platform for a broad slap at a society gone off the rails. Bassist Alan Bishop has gone on to a deep interest in the world's pop music, which has led to the creation of the coolest label for new international music, Sublime Frequencies.
25) In the mid-'80s, America was essentially on the side of white supremecist South Africa during the apartheid years. Ronnie Reagan and Jerry Falwell encouraged people to invest in the country and supported armed attack on the ANC. Let me repeat: one of the many reasons all good Americans should piss on the graves of Reagan and Falwell was that they literally supported apartheid, even into the late 1980s. You might be surprised to learn that one was sticking one's neck out a bit in 1986 or so to suggest that maybe Nelson Mandela shouldn't rot in prison. This is what makes this track from False Prophets so cool; a typical leftie morality play song from their second album (which I recall from at least one benefit comp released earlier) from these scary lookin' folks from the Lower East Side when that part of New York was still edgy. All of the people in suits were liars and cheats and it turned out that the freaks were the ones with morals. Good to remember.
26) We end with a joyful French take on "Istanbul", ripped from a 1940s 78. Is there another quizmaster in the time zone who offers such gifts?
Wednesday, March 4, 7:30pm 12 Steps Down 9th & Christian Sts. Subject Round: FLAGS
Wednesday, March 4, ~10 pm Ray's Happy Birthday Bar 1200 E. Passyunk Ave. (near 9th & Federal Sts.) Subject Round: CARS Note the time change; we're now deliberately making this "the late quiz" as that seems to work better for some odd reason. The Draught Horse 1431 Cecil B. Moore Ave. (Temple University campus, near Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.) No quiz NEXT TWO WEEKS - Temple basketball home games followed by Spring break - quiz returns March 19.
This week I'll be firming up a day and time for a new early-week quiz at a cool food-serving location in Northern Liberties. You will be updated as I have news to impart. Hooray!
