Any Way You Want It

The Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 6.25.2021, incl.

Hello, and welcome once again to the Dr Frank Weakly Reader, that thing I do where I produce an annotated, augmented, illustrated collation of the past week’s “content” so it can be found later on if need be. This one covers the past two weeks as I skipped it last week, as I am often wont to do, if wont means what I think it does. So here be news, links, updates, commentary, and pictures. That sort of thing. As always, feel free but not obligated to read along if you like.

FRONT BURNER

— RAD-18: a/k/a Shards vol iii. This is the new release from Sounds Radical, the final volume in the Shards collection of “orphaned” songs, those with no place on any of the albums. These tracks are all from singles, mostly B sides but also some A sides that didn’t appear on the albums. (You can read the “behind the music” about the previous volumes here: vol. 1; vol 2.)

As you’ll know if you’ve been following the 2021 vinyl pressing saga with regard to this release, massive, surprise delays at the pressing plant owing to a deluge of queue competition made it necessary to delay the originally announced release dates. The late breaking news, though, is that somehow the limited 180 gram pressing managed to get bumped up (for whatever reason.) We’re still sticking to the emended schedule to keep things simple(r), but it is a relief to know we’ll have the product in hand well in advance of the delayed dates.

Those dates are:

August 2: buy links go out to people who called “dibs” for the limited deluxe 180 gram first pressing. (Which you can still do by the way, here.)

September 10: street date for standard pressing(s). Get on that list though, you might as well.

(In other RAD-18 news, the CDs did arrive on schedule, and they look great.)

— It was good while it lasted: “Posts on Google” was a swell feature offered by Google search, wherein you could make posts of “content” related to searches of your stuff that would display in a little window under the “knowledge” panel on the search page. Maybe you didn’t notice it was there, but I found it really useful. The MTX one looked like this:

Well, it still looks that way, but it won’t for long, as Google is discontinuing the feature beginning next month. I’m sure they have their reasons, and my operation will carry on regardless, more or less. But I’ll miss it.

MTX FOR THE MASSES

— Important mess from Sounds Rad, Ministry of Last Chances:

Last call for our limited-run “It’s Hot on MTX Island” t-shirt and hoodie. Once she’s gone, she’s gone.

This last call was a week ago, but Sounds Rad made a video ad out of which a lot of people got a kick so here it is again:

(For a whole lot more on that Hot on MTX Island design, see last, see the previous Weakly Reader. It has a history.)

— Baker’s dozen: Matt found the Yesterday Rules promo / “now appearing at” poster in a dollar bin, speculating that it probably been there for the last sixteen years. Quite likely.

Funny story: there are actually thirteen songs on on it, not twelve.

(In fact, there were originally going to be fourteen, but we held one back because the mix of it wasn’t finished — or finished enough — and we were out of time and money.)

— The melody is God: another great Japanese translation tableau from twitter. The song being cited with reference to the divine melody, btw, is “Book of Revelation” which, given the source country, didn’t surprise me too much.

— Odin nods: we skipped the old Song for Odin in the first of these two weeks, re-visiting instead this old one, “Two Minute Itch” live in Southampton, UK, 1992:

There’s some “minor secrets” here, by the way, from way back when.

— BART is not a person, but rather an extremely smelly form of public transportation: Odin awakens, sort of with “I Just Wanna Do It with You”, live at the Euclid Tavern, Cleveland, 1997:

“Minor secrets” here.

— I write the songs, I write the songs:

To wit:

DR FRANK IS IN THE AIR

— Soul Butcher Meets the Duckhead Buddha: in lieu of a Weakly Reader last week, we re-visited this story, an oldie but a truey.

— Lovin Touchin Squeezin: another true story

I remember there being quite a few notes back and forth, in fact, hers being a bit of a challenge to decipher because the letters were so wide and round and overlapping. Nothing “happened.” Except in my head. Lots happened there.

My buddy Will asked: “if the note had said ‘Anyway You Want It,’ would you have still missed the point?”

And the answer is, probably, but that is way better and how I will tell the anecdote from now on.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MUSIC

PICTURE BOOK

— plates and figs: the goose simulacrum, a tragedy; Flora and the Zephyrs, by Waterhouse (above), from Ovid, one of his loveliest paintings; Farah Fawcett, with bicycle; Joan Bennett, How to Be Attractive; all hands point to Carole Lombard; this Summer, make sure the tape in your pocket’s a Who tape; Why Patty Did It: the Hardcore Story (an X-rated film about Patty Hearst that I’ll probably never have a chance to see, which is too bad as it looks, er, interesting); a lady bathing in a tropical pool, by McGinnis; life’s more fun when you drink B1 (below); three varieties of tigress; Freddie’s artistic pursuits; two dolls with a giant ice cream cone; Gena Bumgarner, chicken nugget scientist; Marie-France Pisier in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express; when you hook up a kiss to a lie detector…

— Roman calendar: Basilides, Cyrinus, Nabor, and Nazarius, martyrs (and not the Ramones, as one commenter quipped); Saint Anthony of Padua, preaching to the fishes; Elisha and the bears; Saint Vitus and companions, being boiled alive; Saint Quiricus, in the process of being sawn in half; Death and Conflagration, part of a triptych by the Polish artist Adam Chmielowski, later to become Saint Albert Chmielowski; Saints Mark and Marcellian, imprisoned; a rather literal depiction of the Immaculate Heart of Mary; The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, a 15th c. painting by Konrad Witz illustrating Luke 5: 1–11; The Miracle of St. Aloysius Gonzaga and the Novice Nicholas Celestini, by Miguel Cabrera; Saint Alban, the first English martyr; Æthelthryth a.k.a. Etheldreda a.k.a. Audrey, illuminated; the nativity of John the Baptist, by Tintoretto; Sancti Adalberti Miraculum Novum, i.e., “the latest miracle of Saint Adalbert” (of Egmond), i.e., this beer, brewed at the re-founded abbey that bears his name, using water from the well that sprung up when the saint’s bones were exhumed in the tenth century. Proost.

IN THE NEWS

— Freddie deBoer on Critical Race Theory’s current culture-war moment (which he says — and I agree — will be over in six months, to be replaced by some other, similarly vague and chameleonic hashtag):

CRT is now a completely floating signifier thanks to the motivated reasoning of those who defend it. Conventional center-left liberals feel compelled to defend CRT because conservatives attack it, but some aspects of that academic field are sufficiently extreme to make advocacy for them unpalatable, so the definition of CRT simply morphs to fit their boundaries for legitimate opinion. For many or most of the people defending critical race theory today, the tradition is just a vague assertion of the prevalence of racism, dressed up in a little academic jargon — because this conception is far more convenient for them than grappling with what CRT actually is.

Which is funny because these liberal defenders act like they alone know what critical race theory really means. A lot of liberals suddenly find themselves not just defending CRT and pretending that they have read deeply in the field but also pretending that they always have known what it means… You can study people’s records on social media or in their written work and find that they never referenced critical race theory before it became an important social signifier in liberal spaces, but that’s easily waved away. In any event, it has become a cultural and professional imperative that good liberals embrace CRT, so they have embraced it.

I’m not sure his “selfish fallacy” construction is of much help but he sees the situation clearly. Worth a read.

— Historismus: also worth a look, this essay in Harper’s by history professor Matthew Karp on a “new historicism” in the popular history and politics of America’s founding. Like so many things, it appears to cut both ways.

FIN

And that’ll wrap it up for this edition of the Dr Frank Weakly Reader. But for those who’ve made it this far down the page, here’s a shapely acoustic guitar in a hotel room:

See you next week, or possibly the week thereafter.