Shock horror! Prescient science friction abounding:

"Somebodies leavin' peanuts on the curbins
For uh white elephant escaped from the zoo
With love"

--"Moonlight on Vermont", Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), from the album "Trout Mask Replica" (1969, WB)

MEXICO CITY — A five-ton elephant escaped from a circus and wandered onto a busy highway, where it was hit by a bus and died on Tuesday.

/Users/Gary/Desktop/0_61_092308_elephant_crash.jpg

State officials say bus driver Tomas Lopez, 49, also was killed and at least four passengers were hospitalized after the pre-dawn collision in Ecatepec, just north of Mexico City.

Mexico State police spokesman Juan Sanchez said the elephant escaped from its cage at the Circo Union, but he declined to give any other details. He said officials were investigating.

The state-funded Notimex news agency reported that the elephant named Indra escaped as its keeper arrived to feed it, knocking down a metal door that led to the street and wandering through two neighborhoods before trying to cross the highway.

--Fox News.com, "Bus Crashes Into 5-Ton Escaped Elephant on Mexican Highway", 9/23/08

Janitors of lunacy had this to say, also:

"The president of Merrill Lynch raised a half-million for McCain before the company was sold last week for half its assumed value. But why do I bring this up? Why? You've heard all this before. So have I. I'm lighting out for the territories."

--from Garrison Keillor's "Moose on the Loose in Palin Country", International Herald Tribune, 9/17/08

"MERRILL LYNCH IS BULLISH ON AMERICA"
--Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet)
Spoken through his horn during "Spitball Scalped Uh Baby", soprano sax/percussion duel with Ed Marimba (Artie Tripp)
Woolsey Hall, Yale University, New Haven Conn. 1/72

Leave it to fair and balanced Fox News to actually run a photo of the dead pachyderm (not such a groundbreaking precedent, actually--one of Young Tom Edison's early newsreels circa 1903 actually documented the death of a pachyderm via electrocution, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/dayintech_0104...then there was the dead elephant wrestled to earth by the Ymir (name taken from Norse mythology, not to be confused with Arabic Emir) in Nathan Juran/Ray Harryhausen's 1957 "20 Million Miles to Earth" http://www.dreadcentral.com/img/reviews/20mill2b.jpg...but I digress!

According to Kurt Loder, whom I ran into last night co-hosting Dusty Wright's occasional film salon for CultureCatch.com (focus being a screening of one of Martin Scorsese's greatest yet mainly unsung achievements, namely his 1985 flick "After Hours"), all is not rebarbative rightwing nonsense (all the news that hints of mint) at Fox News these days as the staff can now boast the presence of the estimable Michael Shore, late of CNN, MTV News, the Soho Weekly News etc, a discerning rockcrit and all around good guy, shoulda invited you to my "Beefheart Night at the Knit" Tribute, Mike, mea culpa mea culpa..

Life is An Obscure Hobo Bumming a Ride on the Omnibus of Art Dept.:

Speaking of "After Hours", Dusty and Kurt a'fore hours last night introduced a screening of this claustrophobic, paranoid black comedy set in darkest early 80's Soho as part of the ongoing CultureCatch.com film salon series held every few months at chic Italian Soho boutique Napapajiri...Caroline and I trucked on down to catch again this very special film chockablock with fun cameos by delightful cult actors such as dominatrix badgirl Linda Fiorentino, who was so great in "The Last Seduction"...the actual Cheechand Chong!... late toughguy Victor Argo (one of Israeli cult-director Amos Kollek's favorite repertory players, so good in Amos' "Fast Food, Fast Women") ...and Dick Miller--yes, that Dick Miller, one of the lights of the early AIP black and white Roger Corman opuses such as 1959 "A Bucket of Blood" http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5668095425624093311&vt=lf&hl=en , also seen munching daffoldils in Corman's original 1960 "The Little Shop of Horrors"...

"A Bucket of Blood"'s connection to "After Hours" is crucial, as a major plot point of the latter concerns mad sculptress Kiki Bridges (played by a very punked-out L. Fiorentino) who churns out both plaster bagel and cream cheese paperweights as well as writhing humanoid sculptures...and dashing "After Hours" anti-hero Griffin Dunne, who eventually becomes a living sculpture himself after being accidentally doused by an overhead shower of liquid plaster in the sub-basement of Club Berlin--a definite homage to Bucket 'O Blood's majorly creaking plot contrivance (corpses immersed in plaster exhibited as sculpture-- not that far afield actually from ancien Soho's nightlife penchant for displaying actual humans as sculptural props, pace Area's shop windows tableaux vivant, all very Gilbert and George)--plot thingy itself a gloss on the central MacGuffin of "Mysteries of the Wax Museum" remade as "House of Wax"--why not see for yourself? The entire "Bucket of Blood" is up for viewing at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6303474703905238262...and dig that opening beat poetry sequence, with saxophone obligato by a young Paul Horn, years and miles away from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine)...

Also, while I'm at it, and in preparation for my upcoming Mexico City poetry and music gig with renowned Spanish word-slinger Bruno Galindo, feast yr eyes on this clip from Jack Arnold's 1958 "High School Confidential!", with Phillipa Fallon as a sexy beat poetess in a sequence which might have given a 12 year old Patti Smith some pointers, set to the sizzliing backbeat of Jackie Coogan ("The Kid", Uncle Fester) of all people http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7877807042167637458&vt=lf&hl=en...wotta cast, too--amblin' Russ Tamblyn ("West Side Story", "Tom Thumb"), John Drew Barrymore, the fabulous Mamie Van Doren, Charles Chaplin Jr., Michael Landon ("Bonanza"'s Little Joe, who always gave it away, "Little House on the Prairie"), William Wellman, Jr., Mel Welles (Gravis Mushnik in "Little Shop of Horrors")--and of course, the one and only Jerry Lee Lewis ("Think about it...")

Also noted: major coppage of Blue Oyster Cult guitarist/singer Don Roeser (Buck Dharma)'s triadic/tritonic guitarpeggio's from the instrumental break of "Don't Fear the Reaper", which occurs in Howard "The Fly" Shore's soundtrack cue underscoring the penultimate sequence where Griffin Dunne is chased through the streets of Soho by "tough titty"-talkin' Catherine O'Hara in her Good Humor Truck leading a mob of crazed Soho vigilantes (having been coaxed into learning this particular atmospheric passage by heart by BOC producer/svengali Sandy Pearlman for last year's Canadian Music Week seminar pitting me live against the Guitar Hero simulacrum, so I know of what I speak here)...

Lastly, final sequenced of film (Griffin Dunne playing Paul Hackett, low-level data entry employee, staggers into his office at the crack of dawn covered with shards of broken plaster after the worst night of his life, sits at his desk in his forlorn cubicle, and as if on cue his computer lights up with the ominous message "Good Morning, Paul") definitely an inspiration for the opening sequence of the Wachowski Bros. "The Matrix", where Keanu Reeves is similarly a low-level word processor working in a cubicle who is greeted with cryptic computer messages...hey, Art begets Art begets Art Tripp...

Think I'll take a lunch break now with Larry Lasker who is in town (co-writer of "War Games" starring a young Matthew Broderick, who told me what a big Beefheart fan he was back in 1982 while we were recording "Ice Cream for Crow" at Amigo Studios in North Hollywood)...

xxLove

Gary

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Posted By Gary Lucas to Gary Lucas at 9/25/2008 09:08:00 AM