Captain Sensible – "Wot" (1982)

 

When I woke up this morning 

I was feelin’ fine

Actually, that’s a lie.

I wasn’t feelin’ fine when I woke up this morning because today is my birthday, and birthdays are not really pleasant occasions for me any more.  

How old am I?  I’ll tell you how old I am.  I am exactly IT’S-NONE-OF-YOUR-F*CKING-BUSINESS years old!

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There was another reason I wasn’t feeling fine when I woke up this morning:  

After dodging the bullet for over two years, I tested positive for the coronavirus on Sunday morning, and my symptoms – coughing, nasal congestion, night sweats, and general lassitude – kicked in shortly thereafter, making my Sunday night very unpleasant.

I’m fully vaccinated and doubly boosted – I got the second booster only a couple of months ago – but The Rona has laid me low regardless.

Doctors would say that while all those shots didn’t prevent me from contracting the Wuhan virus, they greatly reduced the risk that I would land in the ICU, or even die from what some young folks rather cruelly refer to as “The Boomer Reducer.”

Those same doctors would also tell me to suck it up and ignore my “Paxlovid mouth” – the foul metallic taste in my mouth that my antiviral pills are producing.

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Captain Sensible’s 1982 hit single, “Wot,” tells the sad tale of a man whose slumber is disturbed when a jackhammer operator starts his daily work way too early.

Raymond Ian “Captain Sensible” Burns

I had a similar experience this morning.  My dog will happily lie on the floor and look out the front door for hours, but whenever someone walks by with his or her dog – this happens about every ten minutes – my dog starts barking his bloody head off.  

I react somewhat irrationally when I am awakened from a deep sleep – my brain is so befogged that there is no telling what I will do.  If my dog was a chihuahua or a Yorkie, I would probably have picked her up and thrown her into the next school district when she woke me up with her barking this morning.  

It’s lucky for my dog that she’s a yellow Lab and weighs about 60 pounds – I can’t even pick her up, much less throw her far enough away so that her barking won’t bother me.

Click here to listen to “Wot.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Isley Brothers – "I Turned You On" (1969)

 

I turned you on

Now I can't turn you off

In a recent 2 or 3 lines, I talked about my trivia team beating an opponent “like a rented mule.”

I picked up that phrase when I was a child – it was probably something my late grandmother used to say.  (She grew up on a farm in Arkansas in the early 1900s, and her parents very well might have rented a mule to help with plowing or clearing land or other such tasks.) 

My use of that old expression touched off howls of protest from the animal lovers who read 2 or 3 lines.

I acknowledge that one should never beat a mule that refuses to do your bidding– regardless of whether it is owned or merely rented.

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I said we beat our opponent “like a rented mule” because I thought that was somewhat less offensive than saying we beat them “like a red-headed stepchild” – another good ol’ country expression that I picked up from my grandmother.

I suppose it’s not surprising – although it’s certainly regrettable – that one’s stepchild is more likely to become the object of mistreatment than one’s natural child.

Why would a red-headed stepchild be even more likely to become a victim of abuse than a dark-haired stepchild?  

Since most men don’t have red hair, perhaps they would resent a red-headed stepchild more than other stepchildren because the red-headed child is obviously not their biological child.  

Little Orphan Annie gave hope to
redheaded stepchildren everywhere

Some suspect that this expression is an indication of a particular animus against the Irish, who are often red-headed – in other words, “red-headed stepchild” may be the equivalent of “Irish stepchild.”

Others note that Judas Iscariot supposedly had red hair, which may be responsible for the longstanding prejudice against red-headed people.  (One author notes that as a result of the Judas legend, redheads were once thought to be deceitful, and “that the fat of dead red-haired men was used as an ingredient in poisons and fish baits.”)

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The lines quoted  at the beginning of this post are from “I Turned You On,” which was a top-ten hit for the Isley Brothers in 1969.

If the song’s lyrics are accurate, the ability to turn someone on was not a problem for the Isley Brothers.  

The inability to turn someone off once you’ve got them turned on is a problem for fewer people, of course – the Isleys among them, it would seem.

“The Brothers: Isley” album cover

If you ever need help turning someone off after turning them on, feel free to e-mail or text me – I’ve got a few foolproof techniques that I’ll be happy to share with you.

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Click here to listen to “I Turned You On.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Robbie Robertson – "Robbie Robertson" (1987)

 

I'm a man with a clear destination

I'm a man with a broad imagination

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In the last 2 or 3 lines, we learned that the artist Kathryn Dunlevie immersed herself in the solo music of Robbie Robertson – who is best-known as the lead guitarist and primary songwriter of the Band – while working on her Mistick Krewes series of photomontages.  (If you missed that post, it's just below this one – just scroll down until you see it.)

Like that previous post, this one starts off with one of the Mistick Krewes images.  That particular image is titled “Rag Man.”  Its caption consists of three lines from a song called “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” which was released in 1987 on Robbie Robertson’s eponymous debut solo album.

I’ve strewn other images from the Mistick Krewes series throughout this post.

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“Erato”

Kathryn explained to me that the title of the Mistick Krewes series was inspired by New Orleans and the social clubs – known as “krewes” – who create a Mardi Gras parade float, host a Mardi Gras ball, or otherwise participate in Mardi Gras celebrations:  

In New Orleans in 1857 a newly formed secret society, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, began the tradition of celebrating Mardi Gras with a torch-lit procession of extravagant floats.  My Mistick Krewes series is an homage to the rich jumble of that city’s overlapping heritages and the still perceptible aura of its tempestuous history.  

“Bayou Lafourche”

Since its founding in 1718, New Orleans’ cultural, political and natural landscapes have been continually invaded and eroded, bought and sold, enriched and transformed.  A visitor to New Orleans today might pass through districts, buildings and gardens that exhibit the intertwining of centuries of Native American, Spanish, French, African and American influences.  City streets are named for Greek muses, native tribes and 18th-century French nobility.  Surrounding swamplands are swallowed by encroaching gulf waters.  The atmosphere is charged with an air of mystery, a strange sense of desire, and a whiff of something hazily remembered, beckoning from just around the next corner.  It is a place where history is revered, and where it can sometimes be “mistickally” re-experienced.

 

“Tchoupitoulas”

In these works I am combining my photographs with imagery from popular as well as archival sources.  Adding layer upon layer, revisiting each composition again and again, I am working toward scenarios that compel even as they may mislead.  Interweaving elements from nature, history and contemporary life conjures up landscapes populated with plants, wildlife, and otherworldly beings, evoking lost times and the Mardi Gras traditions that celebrate them.

“Terpischore”

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Robbie Robertson and the other musicians who would eventually become the Band got their start in 1958 playing behind Ronnie Hawkins, a rockabilly singer who was a native of Arkansas.  Later they backed up Bob Dylan.

Despite the fact that all the Band’s members save one were Canadian, their music has always sounded more Southern than anything else.  

“Calliope”

One critic described their first album, Music from Big Pink, as “country soul.”  Others noted elements of folk, rock, jazz, and R&B.

The Band’s rootsy, eclectic style is a perfect fit for the cultural melting pot that is New Orleans.  Not surprisingly, Robertson – like Kathryn Dunlevie – feels a deep affinity for the Crescent City.

“New Orleans has always felt like a second home to me musically and spiritually,” he once said. 

“Calcasieu”

A few years after completing work on the Robbie Robertson album, Robertson traveled to New Orleans to collaborate with Aaron and Ivan Neville on the 1991 album, Storyville – which got its title from the New Orleans neighborhood that was once the city’s red-light district.  

Many of Storyville’s brothels employed musicians – Joe “King” Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong were among them – to entertain their patrons.  

“Pontalba”

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Click here to listen to “Testimony,” the final track on the Robbie Robertson album.

Testimony is also the title of Robertson’s 2016 autobiography, which the New York Times described as “[c]onfident and well oiled, [with] the mythic sweep of an early Terrence Malick movie.”  (If you’re familiar with Terrence Malick’s first two movies, Badlands and Days of Heaven, you know that’s high praise indeed.) 

Click below to buy Testimony from Amazon:

(All the photographs of Kathryn Dunlevie’s art that are included in this post are © 2016-2020 by the artist.  All rights reserved.)

Robbie Robertson – "Robbie Robertson" (1987)

Are you out there?

Can you hear me?

Can you see me in the dark?

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Today’s 2 or 3 lines is quite different from the usual, run-of-the-mill 2 or 3 lines.  (Though now that I think about it, 2 or 3 lines is never really run-of-the-mill, is it?)

For one thing, there is no featured song.  This is the first of the 1800-odd posts that I’ve written since giving birth to 2 or 3 lines a little over 12 years ago that features an entire album – not an individual song.

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I usually introduce each post by quoting two or three lines from a song’s lyrics.  Today, I’m starting things off with one of the images from artist Kathryn Dunlevie’s Mistick Krewes series of photomontages.

That particular image is titled “Atchafalaya.”  Its caption consists of three lines from a song called “Fallen Angel,” which was released in 1987 on Robbie Robertson’s eponymous debut solo album.

I’ve strewn several other images from the Mistick Krewes series throughout this post, which will also feature Kathryn’s thoughts on New Orleans and the Robbie Robertson album.  

“Hurricane”

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You may remember that in the fall of 2020, 2 or 3 lines was graced with a guest post written by Kathryn Dunlevie, a college classmate of mine who has been creating what has been described as “wildly imaginative” mixed-media art for many years.

That post featured “Girlfriend Is Better” by the Talking Heads – a song that Kathryn saw the group perform live on their legendary “Stop Making Sense” tour in 1983.

“Avoyelles”

The post also featured a dozen images from the 2020 series of collages that Kathryn titled Women of Wonder.

About a year later, I started pestering Kathryn to do another guest post.  She delivered a draft several months ago, but it took me a lot longer than it should have to format it and get it up on 2 or 3 lines.

But as good ol’ Geoffrey Chaucer once said, “Better than never is late.”  (Today we would say “Better late than never,” of course.)

“Bayou Teche”

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New Orleans is a hot mess – it’s the most exotic and decadent place that an American can visit without a passport.

Kathryn never lived there, but she has many family members and friends with close ties to New Orleans: 

One of my best friends grew up in New Orleans, my best friend from high school has lived there since she finished college, the mother of my first goddaughter grew up there, my dad’s second wife was a New Yorker who spent her childhood summers there with her aunt, one of my brother’s best friends grew up there, and one of my daughters went to Tulane – as did the godmother of my other daughter.  

“Charybdis”

New Orleans – a/k/a/ “The Paris of the South,” “The City That Care Forgot,” and “The Big Easy” – inspired Kathryn to create the series of photomontages she named Mistick Krewes after the social organizations that orchestrate and participate in that city’s famous Mardi Gras celebrations.

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Several years after the Band broke up, Robbie Robertson – who had written the groups’s most famous songs (including “Chest Fever,” “The Weight,” and “The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down”) – released his first solo album.

“Goose Girl”

Kathryn immersed herself in the music from that album – which was titled simply Robbie Robertson – while she created the Mistick Krewes series of images:

I’m not sure when I first heard music from Robbie Robertson’s debut solo album, or how I came to own the CD, but as the images in my new series began to take shape, I knew I had to have that music playing in my studio as I worked.

Listening to it over and over got me, and kept me, in the mood to imagine a cast of characters who would have felt at home in the Crescent City. 

Robertson’s poetic lyrics, fervent music and haunting vocals transported me to New Orleans and guided me through its different eras and its many dimensions.

“The Rebirth of Venus”

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In the next 2 or 3 lines, Kathryn Dunlevie will tell us more about the history of the Mardi Gras krewes, and how the Mistick Krewes images are intended to evoke Mardi Gras traditions and create scenarios that “compel even as they mislead.”  

The remaining Mystick Krewes photomontages  will be strewn throughout that post.

“Spy Boy”

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Click here to watch the official music video for Robbie Robertson’s “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” which was directed by none other than Martin Scorsese.  (Robertson had previously helped to create the musical scores for three of Scorsese’s movies – Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, and The Color of Money.)

Click below to buy the Robbie Robertson album from Amazon:

(All the photographs of Kathryn Dunlevie’s art that are included in this post are © 2016-2020 by the artist.  All rights reserved.)

Five Man Electrical Band – "Signs" (1971)

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Blockin’ out the scenery

Breakin’ my mind

Recently the Washington Post ran a story about a yard-sign battle that had broken out in a residential neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia.

Duelling yard signs

The sign that started the whole thing read as follows:

IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE: BLACK LIVES MATTER, WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS, NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL, SCIENCE IS REAL, LOVE IS LOVE, KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING.

That person’s next-door neighbor responded by planting the following sign in his yard:

 IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE THAT SIMPLISTIC PLATITUDES, TRITE TAUTOLOGIES AND SEMANTICALLY OVERLOADED APHORISMS ARE POOR SUBSTITUTES FOR RESPECTFUL AND RATIONAL DISCUSSIONS ABOUT COMPLEX ISSUES.

Soon after that, another neighbor started display this sign:

IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE THAT USING SNARK AND SARCASM AND PEDANTIC, OVERLY COMPLEX LANGUAGE TO RESPOND TO OTHERS’ SOMEWHAT MEANINGLESS VIRTUE-SIGNALING IS JUST DIVISIVE AND TROLLISH BEHAVIOR, BUT HEY, SIGNS ARE FUN.

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I’m not sure which of the three people who posted those signs is the most annoying.

[NOTE: If you’re not a regular reader of 2 or 3 lines, you may not know that we now have a policy of using “it” as our third-person singular pronoun when we’re not sure whether the person we’re referring to is male or female.  Some people would use “they” in that situation, but “they” is a PLURAL pronoun – not a singular pronoun.] 

The first one is obviously a sanctimonious putz who just had to tell the world how virtuous it is. 

The person who responded by displaying the second sign is no better than the first person – it’s smug and self-satisfied, and thinks it is oh-so-clever, but it’s just a shmegegge.  (By the way, it didn’t come up with the wording on its sign – it bought the sign on Etsy.)

The third sign poster is no doubt very pleased with itself because it thinks its sign demonstrates that it’s so much cooler than the other two sign posters.  But its sign is totally lame, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s just a shmendrik.  

(Sorry for all the Yiddish terms, but I’ve been reading Portnoy’s Complaint.)

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In the 1994 movie The Paper, Robert Duvall – who was portraying the grumpy editor of a big-city tabloid – expressed his dissatisfaction with his newspaper’s many columnists thusly:

We reek of opinions. What every columnist at this paper needs to do is to shut the fuck up!

If you ask me, that sentiment applies to all three of the homeowners who posted the signs that were discussed in the Washington Post article.  They all need to shut the f*ck up!

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“Signs” was a big hit for the Five Man Electrical Band – a Canadian group that originally called itself the Staccatos – in the summer of 1971.  

I heard it many times on the jukebox at Nina’s Green Parrot, a bar in Galena, Kansas, that was  inhabited almost entirely by teenagers because back then it was legal to buy 3.2% beer in Kansas once you were 18 years old.  Click here to read my original post about “Signs” and Nina’s. 

Click here to listen to today’s featured song.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

ZZ Top – "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide" (1979)

Yes, I’m bad,

I’m nationwide

That is such a cool line – don’t you agree?

I don’t really have anything more to say about “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” – there’s no point in gilding the lily.

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“I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” was released in 1979 on Dagüello, ZZ Top’s sixth studio album.

ZZ Top: they’re bad . . . they’re nationwide.

Click here to listen to “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Ice-T – "Don't Hate the Playa" (1999)

 

This goes out to all you haters out there

Actin’ like a brother done did somethin’ wrong

’Cause he got his game tight!

After last week’s trivia competition, I know EXACTLY what Ice-T was talkin’ about!

‘Cause some of my team’s rivals was actin’ like a brother done did somethin’ wrong . . . just because he got his trivia game tight!

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Team Dynamite! – my Tuesday-night trivia team – has been suffering through a long dry spell, but we finally got off the schneid and won convincingly this week.

We dominated the weekly Pourhouse Trivia competitions at Smoketown Creekside  in December and January, finishing on top seven times in nine weeks.  

But until this week, our most recent first-place finish had been on February 2.  And unlike Bill Murray in the Groundhog Day movie, we didn’t get trapped in a time loop that caused us to relive our February 2 experience over and over and over.  Our experience was just the opposite: we went weeks – months, really – without reliving the thrill of victory.

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Some believed Dynamite! had fallen victim to “The Curse of the Rubber Stamp.”  

Earlier this year, I ordered a “Dynamite!” rubber stamp to use on our answer slips.  (You have to fill out and turn in 21 such answer slips during each contest, and it gets very tedious to handwrite “Dynamite” 21 times every week – I figured a rubber stamp would make that task a lot easier.)  

Some viewed this as an act of hubris, the ancient Greek term for an extreme and unreasonable feeling of pride and overconfidence.  The Greeks believed that the gods would punish someone who was guilty of hubris, and there were those on the team who were convinced that was the reason Dynamite! had never won a game in which I had used my rubber stamp.

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The infamous “Curse of the Bambino” ended when the Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series and ended the team’s 86-year-long championship drought.  (It still grieves me deeply to read that sentence.)

Well, if there was a “Curse of the Rubber Stamp,” it lost its grip on Dynamite! this week when our team cruised to a convincing victory over 19 other teams – including our two most bitter rivals.

But the victory was not without controversy.  When I walked up to collect our team’s prize, the game’s host told me that there had been allegations by some of the whiny b*tches that we had beaten like a rented mule that night that Dynamite! had not won fair and square.

Specifically, those LOSERS had complained to him that our team had used more than seven players – seven being the maximum number of players a team can have under Pourhouse Trivia’s rules.

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Unlike “Deflategate,” the “Triviagate” controversy can be understood without knowledge of the Ideal Gas Law.  

Suffice it to say that I sit at the bar during trivia – not at a table, like most teams – because I play with the bartenders, and it would be impossible for me to communicate with the bartenders as they worked  if I sat at a table instead of at the bar.

It’s easy to see how many players are on a team that’s sitting at a table.  But at the bar, people are constantly coming and going.  

The reason why some of our trivia rivals believe we have more than seven players results from the fact that there’s a cornhole tournament each week in an adjacent room.

I’ve become friendly with many of the cornhole crowd.  One of our Dynamite! regulars is the wife of a cornhole competitor, and a couple of our occasional participants are cornholers who join us once they are eliminated from the cornhole competition. 

But there is a constant stream of cornhole kibitzers coming and going by our players because we sit near the location where they come to pick up their beers and settle their tabs.  “Are you winning?” someone may say as he waits for an IPA.  “What was the answer to question X?” another one may ask, referring to a question that he heard asked ten minutes earlier.

It’s all perfectly innocent – believe you me, I know exactly who is contributing to Dynamite! by suggesting answers to me, and I make sure that no more than seven people are participating on any given Tuesday.  

But consistent winners in any sport – e.g., the New York Yankees and New England Patriots – often find themselves envied.  And the same is true of Dynamite!

As the 19th-century French author Victor Hugo once wrote: “The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.”

Hugo wasn’t writing about the petty people who accused Dynamite! of cheating.  But he could have been.

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One way for the members of Dynamite! to express our opinion of those who have unjustly accused us of cheating would be to change our team name and order t-shirts with the new team name printed on them.

The photos that appear throughout this post show some of the potential new team names that we seriously considered.

I was tempted to quote Hank Hill’s high-school football coach – you can click here to hear what that coach used to say when Hank’s team was losing at halftime – but it was too long to fit on a t-shirt.

So I decided that the best choice would be something that former major-league pitcher Joey Eischen once said about Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos.

You see, when the Montreal Expos moved to our nation’s capital and became the Washington Nationals in 2005, Angelos was not happy.  That’s because the stadiums where the Nationals and the Orioles play are less than an hour’s drive apart, and Angelos feared that his train-wreck Orioles team was going to suffer at the box office once there was another baseball team in the area.

When Eischen – who was then a pitcher for the Nationals – heard that Angelos was unhappy, he noted that the Nationals were in Washington to stay, and told the Baltimore owner to get over himself in these well-chosen words:

HE’S GOING TO HAVE TO SUCK ON IT AND LIKE IT!

I think that expresses my feelings about the teams who whined that Dynamite! was cheating rather nicely:

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Ice-T has been a regular on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for years, does TV commercials for Geico and others, and recently competed on The Masked Dancer.

But back in the day he was a pimp, a bank robber, and a gangsta rapper whose song “Cop Killer” was widely condemned thanks to lyrics like these:

I got my twelve-gauge sawed-off

I got my headlights turned off

I'm ’bout to bust some shots off

I'm ’bout to dust some cops off

I'm a COP KILLER!

“Don’t Hate the Playa” was released in 1999 on Ice-T’s seventh studio album, The Seventh Deadly Sin.

Click here to listen to “Don’t Hate the Playa.”

Click on the link below to buy this track on Amazon: