on the verge of the weekend

It’s been a slow week, both around here & on the blogosphere. I guess everybody is busy watching the spectacular implosion of the Republican Party (one wishes…). I’m polishing up my molotov cocktails, dusting off my red flag, & putting new shoestrings on my Doc Martens in preparation for climbing up on some overturned SUVs.
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A very nice birthday celebration earlier this week, capped with the present to end all presents: the “16 Ton Megaset” of all 45 episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Expect many references to funny walks, deceased parrots, falling sheep, and suchlike in the months to come. My students are already suffering; some of them get the jokes, others just think I’m losing it.
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A chance step into a used CD place the other week netted me one of the odder cool things that have turned up lately: Hall Willner’s 2-disc Rogue’s Gallery. Willner is the producer known for enlisting unlikely musicians to interpret various (broadly defined) “classic” corpuses: John Zorn, Lou Reed, Aaron Neville, & Marianne Faithfull singing Kurt Weill (Lost in the Stars); Ringo Starr, Sinead O’Connor, Los Lobos doing songs from Disney films (Stay Awake). Rogue’s Gallery is an offshoot of the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie (Johnny Depp is listed as a co-executive producer), and consists of well, pirate songs. Actually, pirate songs and all other sorts of chanteys & ballads from the 16th thru the 19th centuries. Highlights thus far include Nick Cave’s psychotic version of “Fire Down Below,” Eliza Carthy’s take on “Rolling Sea,” David Thomas’s (he of Pére Ubu) extraterrestrial version of “What Do We Do With a Drunken Sailor,” and Richard Thompson’s heartbreaking and astoundingly beautiful “Mingulay Boat Song” – which at the moment I’m convinced is one of the five or six best tracks he’s ever recorded.
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Last night’s Netflix pleasure (?) was a second viewing of Volker Schlondorff’s 1996 The Ogre. I’m well aware of the film’s shortcomings – especially when compared with the novel on which it’s based, Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des aulnes – but I still find it incredibly moving, especially the tour-de-force final scene in which the blindfolded Abel (John Malkovich), who has spent much of the film as a dim-witted lackey of the Nazis, kidnapping neighborhood boys for a military academy, struggles thru the icy waters of a marsh with the Jewish boy Ephraim on his shoulders, shouting, “Go, Leviathan, go!” (Makes no sense? rent the thing & tell me what you think.)
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Hey, what happened to my Adorno homies? I need some backup here!