This week I found myself listening to Biz Markie’s I Need a Haircut and was struck by this song:
I got curious about the source material, which turned out to be a Donovan song called “Get Thy Bearings.” In fact I own the album it’s on, The Hurdy Gurdy Man, but somehow had never really noticed it. I am now ashamed. This has to be Donovan’s funkiest song, with a loose, hypnotic, irresistible groove:
Great find by the Biz, or maybe his DJ and cousin Cool V. A tip of the hat to them, and to Mr. Leitch, who never quite gets the respect he deserves — even from those of us who ought to know better.
As fate would have it it, this song came up on the ol’ bathroom iPod yesterday, the very day that JC turned 77. 52 years after the first VU album, he’s still out there doing his thing — there he is on the Instagram, futzing around in a recording studio. Cale won’t quit as long as he’s vertical, and I for one take comfort in that.
My reading for the second half of our Morocco trip was Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which seemed like a fairly appropriate pairing. The book is a sort of thinking-man’s Western and parts of Morocco resemble the American Southwest, particularly Arizona and New Mexico. I am less familiar with the even more arid Texas/Mexico region in which Blood Meridian is set, but surely it is not too dissimilar to parts of the Sahara.
McCarthy’s is a much-revered name among modern writers; Harold Bloom, defender of the Western canon, blurbed Blood Meridian as “the major esthetic achievement of any living American writer,” while heavy hitter John Banville said that it “reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby-Dick.”
And yes, the man can write. The following passage on page 20 made me sit up straight in my chair: (more…)
