October 25, 2006

• 
  Happy Hump Day!

  VIENNA – A Viennese man cut off
  his ring finger and presented the digit, still holding his wedding band, to his
  ex-wife after an acrimonious divorce, Austrian news agency APA reported
  Tuesday.

  Charged with dangerous harassment
  and assault for the act, he told a preliminary hearing he did not regret having
  cut off the finger and had chosen deliberately not to reattach it.

  “It was an act of breaking free,”
  the man was quoted as saying. He did not miss his finger, could work well
  without it and did not plan on getting married again anyway, he said.

  
  

  

  Holiest of hopes
  praying ardently
  with no pause

  They go unanswered
  as nobody
  stopped to listen.

  © 2006  Laurie B

  Os Mutantes Os Mutantes 1968

  The Brazilian psychedelic-pop trio Os Mutantes was one of the
  cornerstone groups of the Tropicalia movement, which countered the repressive
  politics and complacent cultural norms of late ’60s Brazil with brazenly
  original, socially aware music. Even more than fellow Tropicalistas Gilberto Gil
  and Caetano Veloso (both of whom collaborated with Os Mutantes), the brothers
  Arnaldo Baptista and Sergo Dias, along with singer Rita Lee, were true musical
  radicals. Week after week, the group brought its Dadaist mix of garage rock,
  doo-wop, lounge music, soul, found-sound snippets, and bizarre production
  touches to television as the house band on the popular show O Pequeno Mundo
  de Ronnie Von; their later multimedia experiments were even more surreal,
  incorporating actors, dancers, film, and crowd participation. As difficult as it
  is to imagine capturing such a psychedelic experience on tape, Os Mutantes’
  self-titled debut does just that. It’s one of the weirdest, goofiest alb! ums
  ever recorded in Portuguese (or any language), a musical fun-house mirror that
  distorts pop into all kinds of strange shapes, letting us laugh even as we
  marvel at the oddness of it all.

  Somebody definitely spiked the punch at
  the house party where Os Mutantes recorded Jorge Ben’s “A Minha Menina.” As a
  random guest grunts and hoots in the background, rock and samba rhythms fight
  for dominance, doo-wop singers interject “boppa-chew-a” in falsetto between
  verses, and hand-clapped rhythms get sloppier as the song goes on. A fuzzy
  guitar-hook sounds as if it has consumed something it shouldn’t have. Gil and
  Veloso’s “Bat Macumba” moves the party to the jungle, its funky bass line
  arising out of a chorus of indigenous chanting and African percussion. Distorted
  guitar noodling erodes the insistent chorus of “Bat macumba hey hey!” one
  syllable at a time, ultimately overtaking the song amidst a flurry of random
  vocal outbursts.

  “O Relgio” trips from one idea to the next with the
  nonsensical flow of a strange dream. Rita Lee sits in her boudoir, singing a
  pastoral melody as a guitar brushes her hair with a delicately plucked arpeggio.
  She must get tired of the bicycle bell that keeps interrupting her reverie,
  because the song unexpectedly explodes into a drugged-out horn and guitar jam
  that swoops in and out of focus, eventually floating back into Lee’s bedroom.
  Even weirder is “Trem Fantasma,” which drags the same circular vocal melody
  through New Orleans jazz, samba, heavy soul rock, dissonant horn counterpoint,
  and even some barbershop before chugging away like the ghost train referred to
  in the song’s title. And thanks to the support of high-profile Tropicalia
  devotees like David Byrne and Beck, Os Mutantes became more popular than ever
  nearly four decades later. Nobody could have predicted that the band would
  return to the stage after breaking up in the mid-’70s. This unexpectedness is
  just pa! rt of their charm. At Os Mutantes’ trippy Carnivale, one minute we’re
  dancing, the next we’re scratching our heads in wonder.
  

  	Listen to all sound clips from this CD
  “Panis et circenses” “A minha menina” “Bat macumba”

  Buy this CD

  That’s it for now–have a great day!

  I love you

  
  

  
  Happy Birthday Donkey_Guy_10!!

  

  • 11:11 am
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