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22 April 2015

My Old Flame / Dead Or Alive, only your actuary knows for sure / thanks for the nifty new prosthetic limbs / Woodmont Country Club / the night they invented codeine! / HAEC OLIM MEMINISSE IUVABIT



Click image to increase distortion.

PizzaQ: What year was this concert? PizzaQ Honor System, no googling, no phoning Klaas in Rotterdam and CERTAINLY do not ask Mom (who was probably there, and not wearing clothes). You must answer the PizzaQ without getting out of your computer chair. If you got one of them-there new-fangled smartphones, you can't use it to surf for the answer. Just stare at the screen. Maybe click a little around the Windows main screen.

(2 gluten-free slices of NYC style pizza with tons of shrooms and complementary plaster cast of Jimi.)
 

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This

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDSUKQZbHEk

is Billie Holiday singing "My Old flame." 


It was introduced by Mae West in a movie, and when she layed it down, it stayed there. Also her youtube version is backed by the Duke Ellington (another Washington DC guy) Orchestra, and that rocks.

But Billie's has to be the greatest cover of this tune. Greatest possible cover ever. 


Miley Cyrus: Do Not Try To Sing This Song.

Not necessary to ban Amy Winehouse from trying.

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On a closely related theme ...

Vleeptron Dude has received an e-mail notification that the 50th Reunion of his high school graduating class (Woodrow Wilson '65) will be held this summer.

I can't tell you who's dead and who's alive, but insurance tables and statistics can tell you HOW MANY guys and HOW MANY girls are dead and how many are still alive. (Oh, you know, +/- 3 or 4 Wilsonites. It's statistics, it's not like Nostradamus crap.)

Mary Ellen died in childbirth. She and her family had full and easy access to the finest medical care on the planet (and a good bit of money too). And remembering Mary Ellen -- I liked her a lot -- I don't think she died trying to birth her baby at home, or in the hot tub, or in a yurt.


One member of WW 65, a good friend, got fucked up in the head by hostile Commie weapons fire serving in river patrols in the Mekong Delta, and died a year after he was sent home. He quickly became a heroin addict. Thanks for serving.

(Like me, he was drafted / conscripted. I was luckier. Never volunteer. I'm sure he had not volunteered for the Mekong Delta tour.)

Woodrow Wilson was a very big and extraordinarily academically excellent public high school. It was kept academically excellent, putting its brighter students regularly into the Ivy League and 7 Sisters colleges and universities, by a de facto conspiracy of racial segregation, which was eventually declared unconstitutional by the U.S. federal appeals court. Judge J. Skelly Wright wrote the unanimous opinion (10 years after Brown v. Topeka).

We got Lefties (if they're still alive) Leftier than moi. We got Lefties what the FBI was trying to catch for decades. After I went back to community college after the Army, I met Jane Fonda at an anti-war presentation. I was the Student Senate ticket taker and she giggled when i said "ticket please."

The USA lost that war. Draft evaders who sneaked off to Canada still face all sorts of USA government shit if they try to come back to their mom's funeral. One old geezer got nabbed and detained in a U.S. Marines brig I think in San Diego for a few months before they just said fuck it and let the old man wheeze back to Canada. This was early during the Afghanistan/Iraq Wars Without End Amen, and the Bush administration just wanted the whole ugly Vietnam draft dodger thing to go away.

The Reunion will be at Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Maryland. Our Senior Prom was there. The President of the Senior Class drove us there. His date, a Nobel Prizewinner's daughter, handed us a bottle of cough syrup laced with codeine. My date was President of the German Club. My Latin teacher was her German teacher and ran the Wilson German club. My date was the Nobel daughter's bff. She hated me and knew i was doing vile unspeakable bad things to her bff. (But I liked the Nobel daughter, like dad, she was real smart. I met her Nobel dad once. His work sort of made him live in D.C.)

The military and Veterans Administration were very proud of their efforts to improve prosthetic limbs to replace the limbs that got blown off Vietnam major combat vets. The G.W. Bush (and Hillary Clinton) wars have also done remarkable robot things to replace major body parts that got all fucked up by IEDs placed by camel jockeys and non-Christian Heathens.



Woodstock (which was not really in Woodstock NY) was a few weeks after I got drafted. I'm pretty sure I would have made a big effort to get to Woodstock. I got cool medals and was often mentioned in dispatches for my extraordinarily fast and error-free typing. I took my first LSD (thanks CH!) while I was in the Army, and every night or all weekend we'd get superatomic reefer-blasted in the barracks while listening to Zappa or Led Zeppelin. The Army started testing our pee a few weeks after i was honorably discharged from active duty.

Please Leave A Comment if you have advice for whether I should go to the Reunion of Woodrow Wilson '65.

My Old Flame might be there. Or she might be dead. An actuary can give you the best guess.

***************************

My old flame
I can't even think of her name
But it's funny now and then
How my thoughts go flashing back again
To my old flame

My old flame
My new lovers all seem so tame
For I haven't met a babe
So magnificent or elegant
As my old flame

I've met so many gals
With fascinating ways
A fascinating gaze in their eyes
Some who sent me up to the skies
But their attempts at love
Were only imitations of

My old flame
I can't even think of her name
But I'll never be the same
Until I discover what became
Of my old flame


Copyright (c) 1934 by Sam Coslow & Arthur Johnston
(slight gender alterations made in original lyrics)


1 comment:

PatFromCH said...

1968
Now there are three reasons for me knowing this. I saw this as the cover of a bootleg once, 1967 would have been too early and 1969 too late because by then Hendrix would form Band Of Gypsies – and it says so on the bloody poster – David Edward Boyd 1968.

There are alternate earths according to theoretical physics in some unreachable dimensions. There must be at least one where the Nam war did not take place and all your school mates are now Happy Pensioners. And there might be a few where Hendrix is still alive. Maybe he joined forces with Sly and the Family, or Marvin Gaye for an eve better version of What’s Going On. Or he hooked up with Gorge, Bootsy and the P-Funk crowd for some Cosmic Love Grooves. Or he went jazzy with Pat Metheney and Ralph Towner or the Mahavishnu crew....or....

Right Now my nephew is still in Teenage Conformity Mode. But once he breaks out of that and decides to find his own stuff his Uncle will be there – with The Ramones, Zeppelin, Minor Threat, Glenn Gould playing Bach – and a copy of Electric Ladyland.....