101 Get-a-'bout alley...

Timely & unexpected conversations, I have them also...

Hook

I was only a young man
In those days. On that evening
The cold was so God damned
Bitter there was nothing.
Nothing. I was in trouble
With a woman, and there was nothing
There but me and dead snow.

I stood on the street corner
In Minneapolis, lashed
This way and that.
Wind rose from some pit,
Hunting me.
Another bus to Saint Paul
Would arrive in three hours,
If I was lucky.

Then the young Sioux
Loomed beside me, his scars
Were just my age.

Ain't got no bus here
A long time, he said.
You got enough money
To get home on?

What did they do
To your hand? I answered.
He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight
And slashed the wind.

Oh, that? he said.
I had a bad time with a woman. Here,
You take this.

Did you ever feel a man hold
Sixty-five cents
In a hook,
And place it
Gently
In your freezing hand?

I took it.
It wasn't the money I needed.
But I took it.

~James Wright

Born in the heat, made a sizzlin' film...

Here's to Fred MacMurray... Happy Birthday...

Happy Birthday Marty

"The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your highball glass."       
~Martin Mull

Birthday of a hellava' dame...the damn sexy Norma Shearer..

"A woman today is good, or she is bad, according to the way she does a thing - and not because of the thing itself."
~Norma Shearer


Strikingly beautiful in the face, Shearer played a wide variety of roles that most admired actresses could only dream about.

Dylan Moran on a good roll on Alcohol...

a poem that'll cut.

1978

That winter we were so broke
we each siphoned gasoline from the other's cars,
lived on tea and cigarettes.
You let me wear the moth-eaten mink
your last lover, the stripper, had left behind.
(Or was she a fire-eater, that Rose, an exotic dancer
heading west and sure you would follow her?
You did.) Icy mornings, I lay in bed
while you warmed both engines; the frost would melt.
The check would come in the mail any day;
you'd take me to breakfast, suddenly rich.
But while we were young and poor our breath
was visible, like steam, like smoke.
(And Rosa, your Rosa, your Rose
was the ghost in each photograph you took.
I turned from the camera, ashamed
of how my face was still unformed.)
When the snow blurred to rain you would go.
I remember the taste of gasoline
and how you wrote a few times from the road
that sullen spring, then never wrote.
~Cecilia Woloch


 

I Declare a Mojo Nixon Day!

"It (..Danville Va...)was one of those towns where you could do one of two things on a Friday night: Drive 'round and get drunk, or get drunk and drive 'round."       
~Mojo Nixon....Happy Birthday, sir!
Mojo Nixon paired with Skid Roper  in the 80’s in San Diego.
Nixon and Roper's third album, 1987's Bo-Day-Shus!!! featured the song "Elvis is Everywhere," a deification of Elvis Presley, (probably his best known song).

Nixon appeared in several promotional spots for MTV during this period, but the network's decision to not show the video for "Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child," which starred Winona Ryder, prompted him to sever ties with the network.

Meanwhile, the duo also wrote songs such as "I Hate Banks", "Burn Down The Malls".

Nixon continued his assault on pop culture, most notably in the song "Don Henley Must Die." Several years after its release, Henley jumped onstage with Nixon at the Hole in the Wall in Austin, TX, to perform the song. Although since Henley didn't actually know the words to the song, the pair agreed to sing "Rick Astley Must Die" instead.
Nixon later praised Henley thusly: "He has balls the size of church bells!"