What Is

This plethora of weird flying little bugs that lurve to drown themselves in my glass of beer or wine and are always in my face? They show up about this time of the year and hang about until usually sometime in mid to late September.

Additionally, do others find the concept of premium cachaça, known in Brasil among its impoverished laboring class drinkers as pinga -- which is where I first encountered it -- and grappa, which I first encountered very early in a late autumn morning in Italy when the fishermen had already returned from the sea and were warming themselves with throwing back shots of this leftover stuff from the making of wine -- absurd? Back at the end of the 80's when these alcoholic products considered previously fit only for the poor and desperate first showed up in my local liquor stores in fine handblown Venetian containers, retailed at hundreds of dollars, it nonplussed our friends and ourselves. It took no time at all then, for premium priced mescals to follow. Is this not the greatest nation of chumps for marketers evah?

You've Got (Snail) Mail

An mp3 burned dvd-rom with all the Number 1 Billboard hits from 1940 - 1970 for Pop, C&W and R&B categories. In reality the Pop category goes back to 1930; in 1930 Billboard didn't have a C&W chart. (It was WWII that made C&W blow up nationally, earning itself a Billboard chart of its own.) This was a gift from another music writer friend, who is currently working on a book about the Beatles, which will be, I promise, disturbing to Beatles-lovers, among whom this Casa is not. Now you know that big dark heresy in our hearts.

Plus, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation, by Matthew Pratt Gurerl. (2008) Harvard Univ. Press. This arrival, thanks to la Amiga who hosts Gotham City Soul.

Plus -- two more discs for The Wire, Season 5, from netflix.

Sometimes its worth the trouble of opening the mail box.

No chex though, which remains far and away the best thing to find in the mailbox.

I Still Have to GO to the Library & Other Trivia

And here's a sample of what I mean by the Yoruba show's poor quality catalog. This is the Elder Woman's staff of power and status that entered my eyes like a lightning bolt. You can't catch even a whiff of the power and glory that this staff embodies. The very top reveals better detail though. I love this woman, with her bead crown hat, topped by hornbill.

I must go to the library, physically, in person. O nos! Do I know how to do this any more?

To find a small run periodical, Rally, from the mid-sixties which published for less than two years and within which the bigoted New Yorker dance critic, Arlene Croce, is reported to have written a vile piece about the brilliant truths embodied within A Birth Of A Nation. This is on no database, and evidently the only place this magazine is available is at the Science, Industry, Business and Law NYPL research facility. So we're lucky that way -- it exists, and it is available to us, without too much trouble. But as I don't know a title or a date I'm going to have to go through these by hand to find it. If, indeed, it exists. It's referred to in other articles about BOAN, but not quoted or cited.

Overheard on the subway platform -- a young woman gestures widely, while speaking to her friend: "And there's all that vampire shit out there too, vampires and zombies, they're everywhere They're even sellin' blood in the stores now for them to drink. These people, they got to learn! This is bad! This is evil! These people gotta listen up! Jesus is comin' any day now, and that will learn 'em."

Woo. That campaign for TruBlood beverage as part of the merchandise tie-in with the promo campaign for the September premiere of Twilight has posters and billboards, and adverts all over town, and especially in the subway now. It is kind of spooky, because it is played for 'realism,' and if you don't know about Twilight this is downright weird.

Maybe they could be outraged by that Nike poster series in the subway too. It's so close to tipping into outright porn that maybe the only way it hasn't fallen in is that they are wearing (some) clothes -- the guys are playing basketball. Finding out it's a Nikes ad isn't easy. It's gross, unless seeing guys' faces all up in other guys' buttocks and crotches is something you enjoy having in your face while riding the subway. If it were women I still probably would find this just about porn, but I wouldn't mind it quite so much. Or maybe I would. Some stuffs have a whole other meaning when they dominate the gaze in the subway.