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Midweek Music Break: The Animals, “The House of the Rising Sun”
[Image: The Animals (original image doctored up by Jude Kane and found on Freakoutville Xpress). And they looked like such nice boys...] To get it out of the way right up front: no house in New Orleans called the “Rising Sun” ever existed.* Or rather, more precisely: never definitively, and no one establishment. Furthermore, it may [...]
Midweek Music Break: Collins H. Driggs (on the Novachord), “Estudiantina,” and… Beer
[The Novachord, closed and open (click either photo for an enlargement); both photos per Wikipedia] When you grew up in the US during a certain window of time (and maybe in certain geographic areas, within certain socioeconomic strata), the culture you could absorb from the adult world was this weird amalgam of past and present. [...]
More Than Enough Room
[Image: postcard, "The Big Shot" (the Big Room, Carlsbad Caverns, NM). For more information, see the note at the bottom of this post.] From whiskey river: Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such [...]
The History of English, in Ten(ish) Minutes
When I was a sophomore in high school — this was just a plain old everyday public high school, not a school for high-achieving nerds or anything — our English teacher let us write an end-of-year research paper on any topic we liked. I have no idea why, of all possible subjects, at the age [...]
Go Right Ahead
[Image: note dropped by South Vietnamese Air Force Major Buang-Ly onto the deck of the USS Midway on April 30, 1975. It says, "Can you move the Helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more, we have enough time to mouve. Please rescue me. Major Buang, [...]
Clear
Not unusually for a Sunday, I took The Pooch for a longish walk this morning. The temperature had broken this week, and it was only in the high 70s. A couple of neighbors took advantage of the opportunity to fire up lawnmower and chainsaw, but few people otherwise had yet ventured out. It was such [...]
What’s in a Song: Body and Soul (1)
It starts in silence. By the end, the singer has thrown him- or herself melodramatically, almost operatically on the mercy of a lost love. It’s drenched in self-pity, but was written for and first performed by a woman once dubbed “Hollywood’s first maneater.” One of its most famous covers includes no vocal at all, and [...]
Making an Illuminated Manuscript
In the category of “Things Our Ancestors Did to Humble Us,” this mini-documentary [UPDATE: a little over six minutes long] from the J. Paul Getty Museum: (If you go to the page at the ArtBabble site where I found this, you might also like some of the “related videos” in the right sidebar there.)
Savage Beasts
A first for Running After My Hat: a guest blogger! Kate Lord Brown is already familiar to some of you as the curator of the blog What Kate Did Next. (She also instigated the Burning Lines experiment in collaborative online fiction of a couple years ago.) More recently, though — and the reason she’s feeling [...]
Midweek Music Break: “St. James Infirmary”
Laissez les bons temps rouler, eh? And among the songs often regarded as “typical New Orleans,” we have the subject of today’s Midweek Music Break. No way could I even begin to match the masterful job of documenting its history which Robert W. Harwood undertook with his I Went Down to St. James Infirmary. One [...]
