101 Get-a-'bout alley...

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!"

A Wonderful Comedy Team in a poem...

Sonnet

The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne,
Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright.
What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic
Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed.

George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man.
He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write
And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic
Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death.


In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition.
She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered
He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation
Stopped - just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills
Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's
     heart fluttered
And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor,
    "But I still have some of the pills."

~Alice Notley

Lets stick a little Chuck in there,

"Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?"

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
~Chuck Palahniuk

Chocolate Jesus... enjoy....

The Master

It's the birthday of crime novelist Raymond Chandler born in Chicago, Illinois (1888). He's known for his novels about the private detective Philip Marlowe such as The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1954). He started out writing second-rate poetry and essays, but couldn't get much published, so he gave up and took a bookkeeping class, got a job at a bank, and went on to become a wealthy oil company executive.

He lost his job when the stock market crashed in 1929. So at the age of 45 he began writing for pulp fiction magazines, which paid about a penny a word.

Chandler was one of the first detective novelists to become known for the quality of his prose, and he became famous for his metaphors. In one novel he wrote, "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight." In another he wrote, "She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket."

Ron Padgett, turnin' into a fave...

Fairy Tale

The little elf is dressed in a floppy cap
and he has a big rosy nose and flaring white eyebrows
with short legs and a jaunty step, though sometimes
he glides across an invisible pond with a bonfire glow on his cheeks:        
it is northern Europe in the nineteenth century and people
are strolling around

Copenhagen

in the late afternoon,
mostly townspeople on their way somewhere,
perhaps to an early collation of smoked fish, rye bread, and cheese,
washed down with a dark beer: ha ha,  I have eaten this excellent meal         
and now I will smoke a little bit and sit back and stare down
at the golden gleam of my watch fob against the coarse dark wool of my vest,
and I will smile with a hideous contentment, because I am an evil man,        
and tonight I will do something evil in this city!

~ Ron Padgett

The Striding Man

Taken From  Modern Drunkard...

 

All Dressed Up and

Somewhere to Go

Johnnie Walker

Scotch Whisky

Johnnie Walker’s first foray into print advertising left something to be desired- the 1883 illustration featured a broken-hearted Scot boo-hooing over a bottle of whisky smashed at his feet. The exercise-obsessed dandy who would lead Johnnie Walker to the pinnacle of scotch supremacy didn’t hit the ground walking until 1909.

Modeled after the company’s founder, John  “Johnnie” Walker, the character was drawn by famed illustrator Tom Browne under the direction of George Walker, John’s grandson. Initially called “The Regency Buck,” the icon’s moniker was later toned down to the more descriptive (if less dashing) “The Striding Man.” The family name had more than a little to do with the logo’s ambulatory nature.

Why It Worked: His top hat, walking stick, breeches and riding boots promise a refined product for an upscale market. Combine that with his elusiveness (yes, he can see you fine through his solid-gold eyeglasses, he simply doesn’t have time to dally with the likes of you) and it makes for a very attractive symbol for the rung-climbing careerist set with money to spend. This  formula also dovetails nicely with Johnnie Walker’s ladder of incrementally expensive color-coded whiskies.

 

Evolution: During the 1950s The Striding Man took a break from pounding the    pavement for a bit of sport, appearing in adverts engaged    in the gentlemanly pursuits of golf and billiards. He hit the bricks shortly thereafter and remained relatively    unchanged until very recently.  All    that pacing must have helped him think, because he presently    seems to have solved the riddle of invisibility (see    right.)    If you thought he the was hard to pin down before, try to catch him after he strips down. Why the change? Graphic    artists are ever striving to make marketing symbols simpler,    and thus more easy to recognize. And in this case you’re going to have to recognize him by his threads, because his face has vanished.

 

Dark Secret: Was once a bootlegger. During America’s bout with prohibition, the distillery engaged in what they called their “special trade,” that being the delivery of boatloads of their whisky into the hands of rumrunners working from small Canadian isles near the U.S. coast.

 

Claim to Fame: Aside from dominating the world-wide Scotch market, Johnnie Walker is Superman’s choice of liquor.