WHAT:  The 27th Annual John Lennon Tribute featuring Curtiss A with a little help from his friends

WHEN: 7:00 PM, Friday December 8th, 2006

WHERE:  First Avenue, located at 701 First Avenue North, Minneapolis, MN 55403-1327.    General Information:   612-332-1775 or  info@first-avenue.com
 

 

This year I’ve got Friday the 8th off, so I’m heading downtown early to get to First Avenue well before 7PM, in hopes of staking out a spot on the main floor in front of the stage.

Wish me luck; by 7 the place will be jammed to the rafters.

Now in its 27th year, the annual Curtiss A  Lennon tribute show, as always on December 8th, seems to get more popular with each year that passes.  Rightly so, too, because for  people who cherish John Lennon’s memory and love his music it’s one of the most tremendous nights of Lennon celebration on the planet. 

Since the spouse works downtown now, he’s going to head over to First Avenue after work and join me in the midst of the ravening horde.  I predict that the number of under-40s in the crowd will be countable on no more than two hands, and may very well be outnumbered by the walker-equipped geriatrics. I can’t remember ever feeling more at home and more comfortable at First Avenue or 7th Street Entry.  At the Curtiss A Lennon show, being 54 years old means being on the young side of the demo.

…Well, in the middle of the demo, anyway.  :)    

 

Roll up for the mystery tour:

Yes, my droogies.  Many years and many pounds ago,  back in the day when I had permed hair and a discernible waistline, we spent a week in Blighty.  

Armed only with unlimited- use- for- 7- days Explorer Passes for the London underground, and unlimited- use- for- 7- days Brit Rail passes for the rest of England, we raced around the country like maniacs, going up to Salisbury to see Stonehenge one day and down to the seaside at Brighton the next.   Of course we went to every Beatles-affiliated location in London that we could find, such as Abbey Road (Duh. And yes, we do have pictures of ourselves walking across the famous crosswalk.)

 

My favorite part of the trip was the day we made the pilgrimage to Liverpool and spent the day 

being driven all over town by an enterprising Liverpudlian who parked his  Studebaker station wagon in front of the local Beatles museum, down the block from the original Cavern Club, and offered a four-hours-long Beatles Tour of Liverpool.  We said Oh Boy, Yeah! and jumped right in, along with a couple from Switzerland who didn’t speak any English other than Beatles lyrics, which they sang instead of speaking.  We sang too.  One of the first stops was (see above) the house where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi.  

All during the tour I kept thinking about what our tour guide’s  life must be like:  every day driving around town from morning til night with his car full of delirious yokels from a hundred different countries, all singing PENNY LANE IS IN MY EARS AND IN MY EYES! HERE BENEATH THE BLUE SUBURBAN SKIES! at the top of their lungs….

Speaking of which, this is the real Penny Lane:

 No sign of a fireman with an hourglass, (and in his pocket is a portrait of the queen), who likes to keep his fire engine clean, but as you can see there is a taxi with a “Flaming tasty!” Burger King ad on its side, which will have to do. 

 

And so, as the sun sinks slowly in the west, we bid adieu to grimy, overcast Liverpool with a picture of one of the last stops on the tour, Strawberry Field (as in “-s Forever”), one of John Lennon’s favorite places.  Please be assured, all evidence of the spouse’s  early-80s perm has been pixilated for your protection.    

We will be found at First Avenue on Friday night — not looking very much like those kids in the pictures, but yeah we will still be singing  LET ME TAKE YOU DOWN CUZ I’M GOING TO …. STRAWBERRY FIELDS at the top of our lungs.

~~~

 

 

Posted: December 6th, 2006 under Curt Almsted, General, General, John Lennon.
Comments: 4

Just got back home after spending the afternoon crisscrossing the 7-county metro area on an epic shopping expedition. If you knew how much I hate shopping and the lengths to which I will go in order to avoid it, you would even more fully appreciate how excruciating an excursion this was.

Stops included:

Costco: to save .07/gallon on gas for the hideous, unloved and unlovable Exploder.
Unfortunately, even the input of relatively cheap gas from a proud Blue merchant will do nothing to halt the Exploder’s inexorable slide into beaterdom and thence to the junkyard. It can’t happen soon enough for me.

My workplace: to pick up my Curtiss A 20th Annual Lennon Tribute CD which I’d foolishly left there Friday. Imagine there’s no Curt Almsted/I wonder if I can..
Nope, I can’t. Best. Lennon-channelling. Singer. Ever.

Michael’s: for a trunkful of fresh eucalyptus branches and wreaths. I like eucalyptus. I put eucalyptus all over the place at my house, and replace it faithfully every 5 years or so whether it needs it or not. Eat my dust bunnies, Martha Stewart!

Costplus World Market: for several canisters of essential Christmas comestible Nyakers pepparkakor(Swedish gingersnaps), and year-round essential Savon de Marseille Extra Pur Olive Lavande handsoap. Yeah, it’s French. And no snark from any of you Farkers about “freedom fries” or “surrender monkeys”, thank you very much. Those Frogs may be cranky and supercilious, but they sure know how to make a good olive oil soap. Zut alors!

Target: for a dozen needed household items plus a search for one more package of the elusive Philips LED Christmas lights (clear), which is what we need in order to have enough clear LED lights to string across the full length of the roofline on the front of [fabled, secluded, heavily fortified family compound] Tildebunkport. No luck, so we’ve decided to forgo the Xmas lights entirely. Our house exterior will be shamefully, nakedly lightless this holiday season, and that’s quite a scandal in our neck of Eden Prairie. I expect the Lawgivers will soon be arriving at my doorstep, after which I’ll be dragged off to appear before Landru and explain why I am Not Of The Body. Oh, and I just remembered: Scotty can’t beam me up, because he’s dead, Jim. Crap!

Last stop Barnes & Noble: where, as a reward for enduring the tedious rigors of shopping, I bought myself the Paula Fox memoir Borrowed Finery *and* its sequel The Coldest Winter: A Stringer In Liberated Europe. ((Bliss)) Unfortunately, a new bio of dangerously megalomaniacal headcase James Dobson was on prominent display nearby, and the sight of his selfrighteously smarmy viz was nearly enough to cause me to hurl right there in the Biography section. I successfully fought down my rising gorge all the way home, but felt an urgent need to clear my mental palate, so it was a relief to see in my Inbox the latest Q&A from rational, thoughtful, champion of progressive Christianity Bishop John Shelby Spong. And fortuitously, this week Spong holds forth on the very topic of Dobson and his odious ilk.

So without further ado, the latest entry in this blog’s ongoing public service campaign to disseminate the words of rational people of faith — a short but therapeutic Spong essay:

Bishop Spong Q&A On the Growth of the Evangelical Community

SXL from the Internet writes:
“After watching a Tom Brokaw special on the growth of Evangelicals and their huge churches, I am rather appalled that their “love” for humanity does not include homosexuals, people that get abortions or gay and lesbian couples who want to marry! How can people believe in such a narrow minded, limited God? Are they really growing as powerful as they were pictured? ”

Dear SXL,
I think that we have in recent years entered a “New Dark Age” in the Western world. It is marked by the rise of religious systems that seek to build security by encouraging prejudice against a designated victim. Both evangelical fundamentalism and the kind of ultra-conservative Roman Catholicism that is at present installed in the Vatican are publicly defined by their visceral and uninformed hostility toward homosexual persons. What the heretic was in the Middle Ages, the black in the days of slavery and segregation, and the Jew in Nazi Germany, the homosexual has become in the religious hysteria of our day. This kind of behavior is always a response to fear and to a rapidly changing world. Security-providing religion, which always requires a victim, is like a drug that carries us over the rough places of life. It is certainly not the wave of the Christian future.

Protestant ‘mega churches’ are usually built on the charisma of the founding or transforming pastor. These leaders are usually sincere people who, even if they are not well informed, have a flair for showmanship. Life, however whether they like it or not, is not made secure simply by identifying the enemy and claiming the certainty of an infallible Pope or an inerrent Bible. Pain and tragedy invade the lives of even the most self-assured people of faith. The cult of the individual leader also enters a crisis when time forces a change in leadership. Many religious institutions do not make this transition well. Beyond that I think we ought to recognize that truth and unity cannot ever be built on identifying a victim that creates the illusion of unity because there is a common enemy. When these institutions say that God hates the same things that the worshiper hates, everyone should be very suspicious.

Dark Ages do not last forever. Ten years from now this phase of our religious history will surely be over. The contemporary scientific and medical data that suggests that homosexuality is a perfectly normal but minority aspect of our humanity, that it is a given and not a chosen aspect of life, will have challenged these prejudices so deeply as to make them seem not only quaint but ignorant. Remember that less than one hundred years ago we were still persecuting left-handed people as evil, deviant and unnatural. In the meantime I share your enormous embarrassment that the Christian church is today the major voice in the Western World in the persecution of those members of our society whose only ’sin’ is that they were born with a sexual orientation different from the majority. Someday we will be terribly ashamed of the Christian leaders in our generation.

– John Shelby Spong

Ahhh, the voice of reason. I feel better already.

 

Posted: December 10th, 2005 under Curt Almsted, General.
Comments: none

Just typing the word “Surf” makes me think of the Silver Surfer, and that brings to mind those long gone yesterdays, now shrouded in the mists of time, when I would walk one short block from my apt on 32nd & Girard to Hennepin Avenue, and buy my regular allotment of Defenders, Inhumans, and Doctor Strange comics from Curt Almsted at Comic City. If you clicked on the Silver Surfer link above, yes that is Elayne’s ever-lovin’ Robin doing the masterful inks. Go take a look.

****

Digby is always brilliant. Better writing cannot be found anywhere, in print or on any of the Internets. Sometimes that brilliance manifests itself in his willingness to spotlight important posts by other writers, and so we can thank Digby for The Noose Around the Hydra, which brings to light Franklin Foer’s truly frightening NRO story about College Republicans. Yikes. And yet, I’m really not surprised. Are you?

****

Meanwhile over at the Power Liberal, our intrepid MN Observer alerts us to a Yellow Jello Attacks warning issued by those Patriotic Protectresses of Proprietude, the CWA, while noting that nowhere in said alert is it made clear just what the heck “Yellow Jello” is supposed to be. Since it’s us leftie libruls who are supposedly launching said attacks in opposition to the confirmation of John Roberts — and that’s certainly a worthy cause — I wondered what the agitprop for such an attack would look like.

Hmmmm [she said, cupping her chin with her hand in a pensive sort of way] maybe that agitprop would look something like this:

Further searching unearthed very few references to “Yellow Jello”, but I think it’s safe to say the phrase probably had its origins with some rightie guy who styles himself The Great Santini, and who posted the following song parody in the comments at famed wingnut laff riot site Scrappleface:

♪ ♪ ♪ YELLOW JELLO™ ♪ ♪ ♪

[Tune: "Mellow Yellow", music and lyrics by Donovan Leitch; performed by Donovan]

[Verse]
Wa-Po’s mad about ChiComs
ChiComs are heroes to libs
Merged into one toxic hype-bomb,
They ply their propaganda and fibs

[Refrain]
They’re makin’ Yellow Jelloâ„¢
(Quite lefty, quite lefty, quite lefty)
The Wa-Po Daily bellow
(Quite lefty, quite lefty, quite lefty)
A marriage made in hell-o

[Verse]
ChiComs hanker for dim sum
Wa-Po loves Cantonese
However you slice it, these scum-bums
Are servin’ standard “progressive” wheeze

[Refrain]
Dressed up as Yellow Jelloâ„¢
(Hard left, hard left, hard left)
Dung Flung in a nutshell-o
(Hard left, hard left, hard left)
Collectivist bordello

[Verse]
Red Star forever to fly
Daily’s veracity’s nil
Board of Editors not shy…
All balance in news they just kill

[Refrain]
They print the Yellow Jelloâ„¢
(Hail Mao, hail Mao, hail Mao)
Predictable bedfellows
(Hail Mao, hail Mao, hail Mao)
In Georgetown, it’ll sell-o

[Verse]
ChiComs’ hatred for Taiwan
Is People’s Daily’s central craze
Wa-Po hates Bush Forty-one
Harmony’s the very next phase

[Refrain]
They’re playin’ Yellow Jelloâ„¢
(Mao duet, Mao duet, Mao duet)
Red violin and cello
(Mao duet, Mao duet, Mao duet)
Their opus has bad smell-o

[Tag, to fade]
They call it Yellow Jelloâ„¢
(Far left, far left, far left)
Awash in Yellow Jelloâ„¢
(Far left, far left, far left)
Commie Yellow Jelloâ„¢

Yellow Jelloâ„¢, Yellow Jelloâ„¢, Yellow Jelloâ„¢….

Posted at Scrappleface by The Great Santini, March 14, 2005.

There. I attributed the fetid wad of doggerel, but please don’t expect me to link to these idjits. Think of all the time that earnest little dweeb spent on his song parody — and the thing still doesn’t scan.

So. Golly whillikers! The Washington Post and Chinese Communists are working hand in glove! Hammer to sickle! Satchel to Page! Librul commie traitor-type that I am, I guess I was pretty spot-on when I chose to base my graphic on a WWII Soviet recruitment poster, nyah-hah-haaaaa [diabolical laughter]!

And now you know the Rest of the Story. ….Good day!

 

Posted: September 25th, 2005 under Curt Almsted, General.
Comments: none

Well I can tell right now that I’ve gotta go see this exhibit. Stories about it yesterday in both the Strib and the Rake, altho in this case I favor the Strib just because they included a photo of my favorite local musician. A man who, as I’ve said before, has been for nearly 30 years my own personal rock and roll savior. Yes, I’m talkin bout the Dean of Scream; the best singer and best Shinders Readmore employee Mpls has ever produced; Buzz Barker hisself; the eternally worshipped Curt Almsted:

Curtiss A : “A legend in his spare time”

Sigh.

 

Posted: July 23rd, 2005 under Curt Almsted, General.
Comments: none

Curtiss A. This pic taken sometime in the mid 80s, I’m guessin

The greatest singer Mpls has ever produced, bar none. The best Shinders Readmore employee of all time. My personal rock n roll idol for nearly 30 years. All of these things wrapped up in one god-like package: Curt Almsted.

Curt gets some pub this week in City Pages. Looky here.

Curtiss A hates you, but probably not as much as he hates, say, Dr. Phil and, for sure, not as much as he hates Republicans–as demonstrated by the 53-year-old rocker/artist/local legend’s latest creation, a T-shirt emblazoned with “Kill Republicans, Not Mourning Doves” on the front, and “Start With Norm” on the back.

This is a column about Curt’s obsession with Jeopardy!, and he’ll get to that, but first…

“Have we forgotten that all Republicans are criminals?” he rants. “Reagan? Iran-Contra? I don’t care how much everybody likes him and thinks he looks like Superman. Fuck him. Fuck Nancy. Fuck Laura [Bush], Nancy, the Bush twins; they should all be eviscerated. And Norm Coleman is spawn of the devil. If more people in Minnesota like Norm Coleman than Al Franken, then we have stopped being Minnesota Nice and we are Minnesota Satan-Worshipper. I…hate…him…more than life itself.”

He bows his head and cackles, perhaps knowing how his words will look in print, but more likely because he doesn’t give a shit. As usual, Curt is in his own world, standing in his basement playhouse amid thousands of superhero action figures, found-art works, and items of rock memorabilia that would be the supreme envy of any pop-art museum curator. But you can’t go see it, because he hates you and because he doesn’t want anyone but his family to know where he lives.

I don’t care. Go ahead and hate us all, Curt. I love you. Always have. Always will. And not just because of that time when I ran into you on Hennepin Avenue and it’d been over 7 years since the last time we met, and the first thing you said to me was “Hey, I saw you on Jeopardy!” Whatta guy. See ya Dec. 8.

Posted: September 30th, 2004 under Curt Almsted, General.
Comments: none