November Rain

Oh, November, how often you torment me. Aside from Thanksgiving, you can be a pretty harsh month. No sun for days, rain instead of snow, very little daylight. A quick search reveals November is the declared Awareness Month for Epilepsy, American Diabetes, Lung, Pancreatic, Prostate, and Stomach Cancer, Alzheimer's, Crohn's and Ulcerative Colitis, Homeless Youth, and Souls in Purgatory. Is this a coincidence? I am not so sure. It is also National Novel Writing Month, which, when added to this roster of delights makes a sick sort of sense. I'd like to petition the additions of The Benefits of Ingesting Vitamin D Awareness Month, and perhaps Scotch Appreciation Month, too, as long as we're continuing with the health-awareness theme.

Witness: The Forecast. Hit Repeat, Repeat, Repeat.

Evidence

But I'm not trying to get too morose or poetic here. No, no, why bother when someone else has said all there is to say about the melancholy of this dark month and its ubiquitous, monkey-wrenching rain? You know what I am talking about. That's right. Guns N' Roses and one of the most expensive and most glorious music videos/songs of all time. I can not recall a single time when this pathos-inducing song did not cheer me up. Maybe this is because it is a good reminder that it could be always be worse. Or maybe its because it is simply an undeniable invitation to wail on the air guitar, which, in my experience, tends to lift spirits.

If those things weren't enough, there is a lot of big hair. The video is broken into two, intercut parts--one, the band on stage, and two, the little dramatic enactment of a love story gone wrong. The concert footage features backup singers with big hair, and adulating hips, and prom-gloved arms sweeping upward in joy and agony. Then there is the biggest-haired orchestra you've ever seen, lead by the biggest-haired, mustachioed, head-banging conductor in the world. There are stadium lights, a blood-weeping crucifix, and a flute. A flute!
Slash wails atop a piano (with his own signature big hair), while Axl channels Elton. This is before the fall, and he still looks nearly wholesome, already addicted and violent, but mercifully free of botox and creepy ginger cornrows, almost normal on the cusp of his steep slide into the abyss of full-fledged assholery.

Then there is the wedding! A priest named Gianantonio! Stephanie Seymour (Axl's then on-again, off-again girlfriend) in her designer dress, all business on top, party down below! And those Sergeant Pepper Pirate jackets! And Axl's weirdo talon pinky coke ring! And that scandalous tongue kiss! And the moment where Slash nearly loses the rings before peacing out mid-ceremony into the highlight of the video...

Poor guy is feeling a little emotional. He needs a little time on his own. Time to execute a most epic shred in the perpetually windy deserted desert churchyard, with his enormous hair seductively billowing while invisible helicopters circle and swoop and zoom in on his shirtless, leather-jacket clad abs, excruciatingly tight pants, heel stomps, crotch thrusts, and incredible mega power stance in one of the greatest, most motherfucking badass melodramatic guitar solos in the history of the universe. Seriously, find me a person on this Earth who can watch that clip and not want to be Slash for even one hot minute. You can't. There is no such person. Everyone wants to be Slash in that moment.

Cut to the strange Godfather-inspired reception, featuring rustically capped Mediterranean boys, 10,000 cigarettes, and the bride's ultra-90's black velvet dress with ribbon choker. Then comes the titular, panic-inducing November Rain, which drives the guests to lose their minds, upturning tables and knocking down the enormous wedding cake that was so recently and tenderly cut, telling us that the party is seriously over. For real. By now the orchestra's conductor is headbanging as if he's being righteously electrocuted, in a way perhaps only another big-haired human (say, me) can truly fully appreciate. Dude is stone-cold rocking it. Then, Boom. Funeral. Bride is dead for reasons unknown, suicide is implied. That blasted rain even interrupts the graveside attendance. Water-phobic mourners run, again, leaving poor booze and pill-addled Axl to toss and turn in his eerily-lit sheets while that same damn relentless rain slides down his enormous windows, the very picture of his poor, broken heart, failure, and sadly, future (Chinese Democracy, anyone?) And, scene.

This is what November is all about, man!

Watch the entire original music video in all of its glory here, and the comic summary here.

Your Sweetness Is My Weakness

With the new summer field season creeping in on us, I've been thinking about our bear friends again. You know we tramp all over the place collecting the hair they leave behind when they rub on tree trunks, power poles, sign posts, and wooden bridges. You know we do this to get genetic samples to monitor population and distribution and such. But why do they do it? Why do the bears rub? Well, we still aren't totally sure, but here is a little evidence that may bode well for the because it feels awesome camp.

Last year my co-worker Brad put up a remote camera near an old bridge positively fuzzy with bear fur. He collected the gear several weeks later, and we were all pretty impressed by the images it caught. The following video is just one sequence. This one is of an adult male, with a, well, with a kind of bare ass. We also caught a mama and two little cubs rubbing, and a black bear, and some other animals sniffing around.

If I were a technological wizard, I'd find a way to sync up this visual with some sweet, sensual tunes. And when you're talking about a big, sexy bear, in the privacy of this own forest, expressing himself to the object of his love and affection, no one gets it done* like The Barry White (RIP). Dude had a voice. Unfortunately, you'll have to settle for playing this ditty in the background while you watch.

Disclaimer: It's all night-vision up in here. You may feel pretty voyeuristic. The footage is dark and fuzzy. There are glowing eyes. Sometimes it is hard to see exactly what is happening. One thing is for damn sure though--that bear is really, really enjoying himself. If he could talk, I am quite certain his voice would sound exactly like the deep smoove groove of Mr. White.


*Seriously.
The man knew what he was he was doing.
Just look at some of the best slow jams from his epic roster:

- I'm Qualified To Satisfy You
- It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me
- Beware
- Passion
- Sho' You Right
- Never, Never Gonna Give You Up
- You're My First, My Last, My Everything
- I'll Do For You Anything You Want Me To
- Love Makin' Music
- Super Lover
- I Wanna Do It Good To Ya
- I'm Gonna Love You Just A Little More Baby

What Fresh Hell Is This?

A Brief Survey of Choice Traditional Irish Ballads:
Or how to be a truly sad and lovesick bastard

(1) Danny Boy
(Classic Irish heartstring-puller, in which our dear Danny Boy is heading off to war, pretty much guaranteed never to see the singer, or a good day, again.)

"And if you come, when all the flowers are dying,
And I am dead, as dead I well may be,
You'll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an "Ave" there for me."

(2) Fields of Athenry
(That same old story in which a young lad is arrested for stealing the lord's corn, and thus set adrift on a prison ship bound for Australia, leaving his true love a single mother...)

"Against the Famine and the Crown
I rebelled they ran me down
Now you must raise our child with dignity."

(3) I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen
(In which a beloved wife dies a slow and painful death, and her devoted husband escorts her body back to her native Ireland. Incidentally, my grandpa Van used to sing this song to me when I was but a wee lass. Because we liked to keep it real and not sugar coat it.)

"The roses all have left your cheek, I've watched them fade away and die..."

(4) An Emigrant's Daughter
(A haunting sea shanty in which a daughter is put on a boat to America. But she gets a fever. She starts hallucinating. And, because this is an Irish Ballad, she dies. The they throw her body into its watery grave.)

"Oh please ne'er forget me though waves now lie o'er me
I was once young and pretty and my spirit ran free,
But destiny tore me from country and loved ones,
And from the new land I was never to see."

 (5) Carrickfergus
(In which a man starts hitting the bottle after being cuckolded by a bawdy and humorous ditty.)

"But I'll sing no more now till I get a drink,
For I'm drunk today and I'm seldom sober..."

(6) My Dark Rosaleen
(Here a man gets his serious pine on while missing his boo, Rosie.)

"Woe and pain, pain and woe,
Are my lot night and noon,
To see your bright face clouded so,
Like to the mournful moon."

(7) I'm Stretched on Your Grave
(I think this one pretty much speaks for itself...mel-o-drama!)

"I am stretched on your grave and I'll lie there forever..."

(8) The Wind That Shakes the Barley
(In which a doomed young rebel loses his love and marches into the 1798 Irish Rebellion, pockets stuffed with oats to munch along the way. Of course, it all ends badly. *Interesting side note: Random patches of barley popped up all over the countryside post-rebellion, indicating both the mass unmarked graves of Irish soldiers (barley in pocket), and symbolizing that stubborn Irish tenacity and a big fuck off to British rule. The Wind that Shakes the Barley is also a gorgeously sad film starting the extremely easy-on-the-eyes Cillian Murphy. In layer upon layer of fine Irish tweed.)

"While sad I kissed away her tears, my fond arms round her flinging
The foeman's shot burst on our ears from out the wildwood ringing
A bullet pierced my true love's side in life's young spring so early
And on my breast in blood she died while soft winds shook the barley."

(9) Four Green Fields
(This song is in it to win it. It pretty much delivers all the goods... plundering, pillaging, loss, starvation, dead family, blood, guts, screaming children, British invasion...)

"There was war and death, plundering and pillage
My children starved, by mountain, valley and sea
And their wailing cries, they shook the very heavens
My four green fields ran red with their blood, said she."

But, for all their suffering, and proclivity for reliving that suffering nightly through song, the Irish also have a tremendously big-hearted, admirable, and irreverent sense of humor.... and so I leave you with this gem..

(10) Lily the Pink
(In which the dubiously named witchy woman Lily the Pink prescribes her medicinal compounds to cure whatever ails the locals, for which she is immortalized in a drinking song.)

Quotes won't do it justice, so you'll just have to listen and watch this amazing cover here.

CocoRosie - Animals

The Real Tuesday Weld - Last Time In Clerkenwell

The Lovely Sparrows - Year of the Dog