Kestrell

It is my fifteenth anniversary with rushthatspeaks and I am spending it with various doctors instead of my husband and our traditional restaurant. We had a better wedding the last plague year.

For reasons as yet unknown to medical science, although I am doing my best to get medical science to find them out, I am in the acutely worst shape I have been in since the summer of 2023 and it is devouring all of my time. Have some links.

1. In music still in situ on my computer, I have had the Punters' "Jim Harris" (1997) since 2005 when I believe it to have been one of the fruits of a now-deceased music community on LJ. It is not a variant on Child 243; it was contemporarily written by Peter Leonard of Isle Valen about a local schooner fender-bender in 1934. I discovered last year that it's got a Roud number and I have never gotten over the way its last verse turns from traditionally recounted maritime mini-disaster to Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi:

It's all right when the wheel is going up, but when she turns for to go down
You all might meet with the same sad fate as Jim Harris in Paradise Sound

The folk tradition being what it is, this song is naturally the only thing I know abour its eponymous captain, which is rough.

2. I should not have read this article about the Instagram filter valley of the current rejuvenative craze for deep-plane face-lifts no matter what because one of the reasons I have trouble being read as younger than my age is that I have worked very hard to reach this one, but toward the end of the piece I hit an anonymously quoted surgeon, "When you look at someone else with an elite face-lift . . . all you should be thinking is, How did you age better than me? The goal is you want to look genetically dominant to other people," and at the notion that eugenics should be aspirationally mixed with ageism, I just wanted that surgeon to be operated upon by Dr. Einstein after an all-night open-bar horror marathon. I felt better after dialing up the grainily inimitable footage of Pamela Blair's "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three" (1975).

3. Thanks to listening to Arthur Askey, I became curious about the origins of the musical have-a-banana phrase which diffused decades ago from music hall into general pop culture and apparently the best guess is a Rocky Horror-style audience improvisation that has now endured as a meme for more than a century. Good for it.

I just want to sleep and read books and write about movies. Who's even asking for a small fortune?

In lesser catastrophes than the general planet, I have been noticing over the last eight months that while the majority of my audio transferred successfully from the archival hard drive that was for fourteen years my beloved Bertie Owen, certain artists seem to have gone incompletely and inexplicably missing, generally to be discovered by trying to cue up a track which no longer exists on my computer, which is what happened last night with Neil Hannon. Of the six albums by the Divine Comedy that I used to own along with a handful of random tracks and singles, the sole full-length survivors are Promenade (1994) and Bang Goes the Knighthood (2010), which are neither chronologically nor alphabetically even next to one another. The consolation lining is that at least I didn't lose one of my favorite songs which can be found on the latter, "Assume the Perpendicular." Like much of its composer's catalogue, it's a chamber-pop character sketch, wittily written and performed with a sincere straight face: trying to fix its position on the irony slider is pointless. "Slip on your Barbour jacket, jump in my old MG" sets the class bracket of its band of day-trippers, while the tenor of their conversation is nailed with equal concision by the architectural divisions of "Lavinia loves the lintels, Anna the architraves / Ben's impressed by the buttresses thrust up the chapel nave." Aside from the narrator who thought of that last line and delivers it with cheekily Coward-esque crispness, none of these people sounds like the most exciting company for a heritage day out with their diffident intentions to "make complimentary sounds and talk about nothing in particular." And yet as the song catchily progresses, these pretentious characters find themselves falling into the fun of their excursion, meandering the hedge maze, bouncing on historical beds, swinging around the library's railed ladders, and the music loosens right up along with them, the neat hand-clapped piano joined first by a brisk roll of drums and then a flourish of brass that unreel from a marching tattoo into a loose-jointed jam, until by the time a music-hallish banjo has ricky-tickied in on the action, the self-conscious distance of the original chorus has turned into "wild ecstatic sounds" and everybody including the listener is having a wonderful time tearing around this stately home where playing at aristocracy has given way to goofing off. It all ends in a little twiddle of electronica like a punch line. It doesn't really matter if it's sending up the sightseers who aren't even interested in the cider in Somerset, what it feels like as it winds down from that explosive high of exploration is a genuine invitation that I can play twenty times in a row, even if my closest examples of the Georgian style are not so much country houses as random historical registers and the occasional Revolutionary museum that I pass on the way to my parents or a supermarket.