September17, 2010: Late Summer Sun

Mid-September already? Girls are all downtown, and I have the house to myself for the next hour. A Great Lakes Brewing Co. Oktoberfest and iTunes shuffle to keep my company.

Snapped the above shot with Hipstamatic (Bettie XL Lens + Ina's 1935 film= a winning combination) right after I got home around 6:30 tonight. Golden Hour light streaming through the house and a deep silence about the abode made for a wonderfully becalmed moment.

Late Summer Sonic Harvest

Music cleaning out my ears, satisfying my soul and putting a shake in my hips this year.

Nuggets of the Golden Age of Gospel, a 4-CD set of rare gospel covering the years 1945 through 1958. I keep reaching for this one like a cool glass of water. Or, as in my own case, a nicely chilled Diet Coke. Sometimes 4 a day. That's 48 ounces too many. In any case the songs on this compilation have been our Sunday morning sermons for the better part of this past summer. Here's what I love: Hammond organs, gritty reverb washing over chugging guitars, swinging snares, pre doo-wop harmony beds and most of all, one soulful, sanctified lead vocal after another reaching up for glory hallelujah.


-Another favorite from this year is Pastor T.L. Barrott and the Youth For Christ Choir SINGS! and their awesome self-released 1971 gospel-soul album, Like A Ship...(Without A Sail). The great Chicago based reissue label, Numero Group put the title song from this album on their stellar '09 compilation Good God! Born Again Funk, and it just about knocked my socks off. Holy smokes! It's got, without a doubt, one of the most exalted choirs you'll ever hear. The whole album was just recently re-released by another reissue label, Light In The Attic, and the whole thing has been easing our souls of late.

The most welcome return of the year has been The Books new album, The Way Out. Along with Matthew Herbert, nobody else has done more for advancing the art of sampling.

But I'm equally smitten by the videos Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong of the Books have made to accompany their live performances. Flea market video finds, old super-8 home movies, oddball news footage and edited to perfectly syncopate with their music. The films and the songs follow the same groove. There's a lovely lo-fi aesthetic to it all while its carefully executed edits and syncopation owe more than a little to Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi and the flood of hyper-edit remixing folks have been posting to YouTube over the last few years.

On the video below for their song, Take Time, the editing is breathtaking in its execution. If anything, for the patience and time it must have taken to edit it all, an inspired collection of found-videos micro-looped to ride the songs rhythm. It's odd but equally rousing, slapstick silly at times watching the jerky movements of people repeated in rapid-fire little stutters, though surprisingly sweet. And ambiguous enough to allow the viewer to make their own story. When I saw The Books in concert a few years back at the Old Town they performed their whole show with video accompaniment and, not surprisingly, I loved the whole thing.

Double Rainbow Guy

Despite myself, I've come to adore Hungrybear9562's emotional roller coaster of an encounter with a double rainbow. It's one of those remarkable home movies that drifts a while through YouTube (this one was at sea for roughly 6 months) before unexpectedly going viral. It just takes the right confluence of events, the right catalyst to see it, and suddenly 6 million people have tuned in to witness your ravings. You decide to sell t-shirts. Hell, why not?

In Hungrybear's encounter with double rainbows we experience epiphany, wonder and, surely, a very potent hallucinogenic, while one man unexpectedly confronts transcendental rainbow action from his backyard somewhere in Yosemite. It's almost impossible not to laugh while watching the video. His reaction to a double rainbow (and here it's important to note that if ever there were a better cultural signifier for all things fantasy and moon beamed then a rainbow, I'm not aware of it) is so terrifically sincere. I find myself conjuring his background while I watch what I've come to call "an overflowing": you know, like he played a lot of D&D back in the day, and when you walk into his house the air is probably thick with comic book pulp and there's maybe even a framed life size portrait of Gandalf the White hanging charmingly above his fireplace, and admittedly, this last one would be audacious and worthy of applause. But according to a recent profile in Fast Company (thanks, Internet!) he's living in "Yosemite raising Queensland Heelers and wild turkeys." Though he certainly does nothing to dissuade us of our bias in the profile, the fact that he looks vaguely of Hurley--heck, the fact that the whole video could best be described as "hurley-esque," has its own little pop-cultural shimmy to it.

Of the original clip below, it's definitely another to add to the rapidly growing cannon of amateur video documenting the hallucinogenic experience. What I think I like most about this one is how it follows an almost textbook-like narrative--how succinctly it captures the experience of being terrifically high and stumbling into a moment of unexpected beauty. From shouts of joy and laughter to a sobbing, quivering heap in no less then 3 minutes. It's as cleansing as it is spiritually uplifting.

Plus folks are tossing it up into auto-tuned Euro-cheese, so it's hard for me not to love this more then I probably should.

The Deer In The Wood

We finished reading Little House In the Big Woods to Abby last night. Cathy and I have been taking turns over the last month reading a chapter or two each night to her before bedtime. We were riveted by tales of spooky panthers chasing grandpa through the darkest woods; of the explosive moment where Laura slaps her sister Mary because Mary insists her hair is prettier; and the delicious scene where Pa returns home from an outing to collect honey, pretending he hasn't had much success, only to surprise Ma with buckets and buckets of the stuff!

I had forgotten, in the 25 or so years since I first read it, the wide-eyed cinematic splendor of the books final chapter, The Deer in the Wood. You might remember? Pa lays a deer-lick trap in the forest and spends a crisp autumn night camped out in a tree with his gun. He's going to bring his family fresh venison and whatnot, whatever unfortunate critter comes sniffing and licking about long enough so as Pa can put in a good shot.

But Pa goes and completely forgets the reason he's there: to bring his family fresh meat! We know from previous chapters that Pa doesn't waste any time when it comes to providing his family with their fill of meat. He's a fierce customer, a frontiersman providing for his family, and a damn good shot.

But Pa is instead overcome by waves of fellow-feeling for nature and its noble creatures. He can't bring himself to shoot a single one of the animals that falls prey to his mighty deer-lick. He ends up having this wonderfully becalmed transcendentalist moment as cozy as the accompanying Garth Williams illustration. It's a lovely piece of writing.

Though what really makes the final chapter sing isn't Pa and his inner-Emerson at all. It's Wilder herself, describing the moment she first awoke to the present, announcing "now is now. It can never be a long time ago." Its a firework of a line, the surprise of Laura awakening to the sweet, irreplaceable now of things. Like Pa, she's overcome by the moment, of the pause before the past is past and the future beckons. I need to check this book out!

A Modest Attraction

The lawn on our new house in Edgebrook is a little mangy.


I've been mowing it about once a week for the past month and it's thick with dandelion, rogue clover and struggling Kentucky Bluegrass. It looks tidy for a day or two after I mow it.

Most of the lawns in the neighborhood are lush and tidy. They're shampooed and conditioned then tended to by weekly lawn and yard maintenance crews. I see them when I'm home with the girls on weekday afternoons. A couple trucks pull up, mulch is spread, twigs are plucked from shrubs and large industrial mowers give the lawn a nice manicure.

These kinds of lawns are a convention that few stray from and a relatively new one at that. They date back to at least the 1870s, if not earlier. In his amazing book, Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth T. Jackson writes of the origins of the modern day yard:

By 1870 separateness had become essential to the identity of the suburban house. The yard was expected to be large and private and designed for both active and passive recreation, in direct antithesis to the dense lifestyle from which many families had recently moved. The new ideal was no longer to be part of a close community, but to have a self-contained unit, a private wonderland walled off from the rest of the world. Although visually open to the street, the lawn was a barrier--a kind of verdant moat separating the household from the threats and temptations of the city. It served as a means of transition from the public street to the very private house, as a kind of space that, by the very fact of its having no clearly defined function, mediated between the activities of the outside and the activities of the inside.

By the time of the post-WWII housing boom, this lawn care vision reigned supreme and millions of new home buyers invested in all the tools and accessories that came with its upkeep. Our own garage is testimony to this.

These lawns look great, don't get me wrong. Folks have managed to do all sorts of amazing things with their lawns, and those I find I like the most always seem to convey a peaceful stillness. They stir memories of my own suburban upbringing, my parents lawn and my grandparents lawn in North Olmsted. I respect and empathize with the kind of love they can inspire in their owners.

That being said, I'm looking forward to removing our front lawn next spring. The usual concern that comes with suggesting such a thing is the neighbors might somehow take offense, see it as blemish on the otherwise unspoken agreement to keep and maintain well-groomed lawns. But that's not it at all. In the year or so since I worked on the documentary about the Morton Grove Prairie Nature Preserve I've wanted to turn whatever ended up being my lawn into a showcase for the plants that used to cover roughly 2/3 of Illinois just a couple hundred years ago.

I'll admit, I've become a little obsessed. I'm thrilled by the prospects of landscaping with native plants instead of keeping up with our current mowing regimen. What we're envisioning will be nicely groomed and well tended. It won't be freaky, unruly, pagan or fountain-endowed. It won't frighten children or make dogs growl. I have no doubt that we'll make good and attentive stewards! My genuine hope is that it'll make a nice contribution to our neighborhood, mabye even become a modest attraction. We'll sell t-shirts.

Skilling Heralds Warmth

Dear Tom Skilling and Tribune Weather Center Team,

This forecast is outrageous, my brothers! There's so much short sleeve and open window potential here. Folks will grill and it's going to smell awesome. And I especially like that you're currently predicting a late-day thunder storm on Saturday. Too much! I imagine listening to the thunder rumble overhead from the comfort of my living room. The lights might even flash off and on in our house after one of those thundery hullabaloos and we'll reach for some flash lights and candles, just in case.

Who can I blame if this forecast turns out to be wildly inaccurate?

.

Roger Ebert in Esquire

Chris Jones' profile on Roger Ebert in this month's issue of Esquire is one of the best things I've read so far this year. For real!

A few years back Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer and along with it his ability to speak, eat or drink using his mouth. Though luckily, for him and us, he didn't lose his ability to write. And Ebert writes a lot these days. And not just about movies, though he still writes as passionately and eloquently as ever about them for the Sun Times, but sharing more of his own stories now, taking intimate stock of his life while engaging in this remarkable hands-on way with his readers, interacting and responding to their comments and becoming, in fact, their readers as well. It's hard not to be inspired by just how far he's expanded his presence as a public writer.

Though what ultimately makes Jones' profile so engrossing, is how well the piece conveys the happiness, this genuine sense of contentment, Ebert has found through the way his writing has evolved in the three years since he lost his lower jaw. Ebert's enjoying, at age 67, this amazing writing renaissance. There's a real spark to his writing, a more personal and intimate side to it that often has nothing to do with movies. He's politically feisty, frequently hurling witty ripostes via Twitter (and Ebert is, I think, one of the masters of Twitters 140 word limitation) at whatever conservative pundit, politician or religious leader happened to raise his Liberal ire just then. He posts often and while I'm watching the girls and checking in on Twitter throughout the day, Ebert's posts read like a tonic. He's very good at it.

Also Cool: back in August of last year Ebert wrote about discovering the Scottish company CereProc, developers of "the world's most advanced text to speech technology," while browsing the subject online. It turns out , working with Ebert, the company is currently beta-testing software that will allow Ebert to draw from a decent sized database chock full of quality samples of his voice. CereProc simply raided the archives, drawing from the thousands of television hours and DVD commentaries Ebert had logged over the years, carefully cutting, pasting and post-editng so he can now draw from these recordings, reassembling them in whatever way he chooses. With speakers and a computer he'll be able to more actively partake in conversations. His voice will be heard. Eventually CereProc promises Ebert will be able to add simple commands to give greater or lesser intonation or emphasis to his voice, a closer approximation of how we actually speak. Ebert sampling Ebert. According to the Guardian, it'll be debuting on his upcoming Oprah appearance. I'm excited for the guy and can't wait to hear it.

E.B. White and Mortality

I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a duel existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation.

from Once More To The Lake, E.B. White

One of my favorite essays from high school English class. Read it again a few nights ago while packing up books for our upcoming move. It left an impression when I first read it, though I was primed for it having been an ardent fan of White's Charlotte's Web from 4th Grade on.

I don't know what I admire most about the essay. It's a gentle but never saccharine meditation on an old childhood vacation spot in Maine White's family would visit each August. And it's a deceptively gentle essay, plump with White's descriptive aplomb and storytelling gracefulness. But it's also a darkly ruminative meditation on the passage of time and mortality. It deals frankly with how one's memory for a cherished place or time and the nostalgia such things are inevitably seasoned with, are made sometimes to confront a raw and disparate present.

The essay is also one of the finest, most aspirational examples of how to employ foreshadowing effectively. There's a beautiful thunderstorm White describes at the end of Once More To The Lake that masterfully frames its final paragraph. It's the essay's ending, "the chill of death", that I remember the most.

4!

Congratulations to Abby on the successful completion of her 4th orbit around the sun! You are loved madly little girl, and yes, you will always be my baby.

Fired Up, Ready to Go, Wearing Christmas Red!

Whatever you may think of the 44th President of the United States, and no matter how history may ultimately come to judge his tenure as such, the above photograph is one for the ages.

According to the caption on the White House's flickr page, the President and the First Lady are greeting "Edith Childs, from Greenwood, S.C., in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, during a holiday party, Dec. 4, 2009. Childs coined the campaign slogan "fired up, ready to go."

What I like best about it is the decked-out (literally!) head-to-toe Christmas red of Child's outfit. She popping out of this photograph like a chestnut on an open fire! The First Lady looks elegantly 50's retro. And the President is caught, somewhat awkwardly, coming in for what looks to be a spirited embrace of all that red. Or he's doing a Ray Charles imitation. Behind them, serenely staring out from his framed vantage above the fireplace, is George Washington.

I think she's a little bit crazy

Of all the things I've read with Abby, nothing has quite matched the fun we've had reading Shel Silverstein together. We fell hard for Where the Sidewalk Ends earlier this year, in the spring. It was Cathy's old copy. We liked it so much that one morning this past June we made our way into one of our favorite bookstores and picked up a copy of A Light in the Attic. We needed more of the stuff. Both were favorites of mine as a kid. The Giving Tree, too. Part of the childhood literary cannon.

One of our early favorites was The Sitter from A Light In the Attic. You remember it. Crazy Mrs. McTwitter, the babysitter who thinks "a baby-sitter's "supposed / To sit upon the baby."

As a kid, I think what I found most appealing was how nutty and invitingly subversive Silverstein's poems and illustrations were. That still holds up today. Both Abby and I love Mrs. McTwitter's super-fried perm, her dotty stare and those little baby legs so winkingly splayed beneath her well-rounded bottom.

Another One of the Best Things To Ever Happen to Me Turns 1

Happy 1st birthday my beautiful little drooling girl. Your Daddy loves you madly!

Waltz with Bashir

Finally got around to watching Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir last night. It's an animated documentary that attempts to clarify what film critic Jonathan Murray rightly pegged as Folman's, "at first apparently insurmountable, personal confusion as to his physical and moral proximity to the massacre of defenseless Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut."

So probably not your typical Saturday night popcorn film. The subject matter is harrowing, fraught with the anguished, often nightmarish, memories of Israeli veterans. In an interview from this past spring in Cineaste magazine, Folman said he was "interested in the memory of the (Sabra and Shatila refugee) massacre as seen by the common soldier." Hoping to accomplish that, he interviewed on camera a series of one on one conversations with several fellow veterans/friends on a sound stage, the raw footage and dialogue from which he then used to storyboard the documentary and animate it.

There was something initially off-putting about Waltz with Bashir's use of Flash for its animation. I thought it lacked fluidity. It's a cut-out style of animation similar to what you see on South Park or those Terry Gilliam made for Monty Python's Flying Circus. According to the film's art director, David Polonsky, the possibility of animating the film entirely in computer generated imagery or in the more classical cel animation style was never even a possibility given the film's limited budget. In a great interview with Polonsky about the film's animation process, he says:

The characters were sketched and scanned in Photoshop, then copied into Flash and dismembered into hundreds of tiny pieces to allow for complicated movement, while the backgrounds were Photoshop that were exposed to after-effects, and then the whole film was given a thick layer of after-effects. And there was a little bit of 3-D (CGI).

For the first few minutes I found Flash's lack of character fluidity, the stiffness and puppetlike demeanor it gave to the film's many animated narrator's distracting, especially given the gravity of the subject matter. But as the documentary progressed I was won over by how ingeniously Polonsky and his small team of animators worked with those limitations, creating an animated film strikingly of itself.

The breaking up (or dismemberment, to be more exact) of those character sketches into "hundreds of tiny pieces" that were then animated with Flash is perfectly befitting of the film's preoccupations with the fluidity of memories, dreams, fantasies and the subconscious. It gives everything a protean, dreamlike quality.

Adding the the formal innovation was the decision by Polonsky to take photographs of the actual environments (buildings, tanks, cars, roads) the veterans in the film are describing and adding them in as background details. It creates a highly effective visual incongruity, with the hyper-realism of the environmental photographs (given a touch of after-effects), mingling with the Flash rendered character sketches of the veteran's recollections.

Abby and Dorothy Ashby

Because suddenly one night this past summer it became essential that Abby be given the opportunity to zip herself up in an old sleep sack she had long since outgrown, and then have her picture taken, that we're lucky enough to have this little memento. I love it. Not only for the joy in Abby's face and her celebratory touchdown arms. But for how her feet and shoulders have drawn the sleep sack into a taut triangle. Though I probably love it most of all for how it never fails to remind me of the cover of Dorothy Ashby's soulful album, The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby.


It's all about the rugs they're posing on. Though Dorothy Ashby looks like she's flying on hers, sweetly plucking some cosmic grooves from her harp while flying the space ways to pick up the dry cleaning. It's more about the colors the two pictures share then any similarities of pattern. It would be sublimely weird, though, to discover Ashby posing in a clearly overgrown sleep sack on the album's back cover.

Safe As Houses

I've wanted to read this book for about 10 years now. I finally bought a copy and cracked it in late August. I've found it to be the perfect tonic for getting over the fact that we've had one of the coldest October starts in 133 years. Even better, it's a great read about a subject I've had a big crush on for a long, long time. The suburbs and me go way, way back. The one I grew up in, Bay Village, is a woodsy little coastal suburb in Northeastern Ohio that shares its northern border with Lake Erie. It's proximity to the Lake is undeniably its best attribute, though it's not without an interior magic of its own. A nice little chunk of the Cleveland Metroparks hugs the coast toward the center of Bay where it's home to one the largest public beaches on the West Side of Cleveland. Once, in the 80s, however, Better Homes and Garden's successfully shamed many of us teenagers by rating Bay Village one of the nation's safest suburbs.

We Meant to Give This Past Summer a Proper Send Off

We meant to give this past summer a proper send off. But then autumn went cold and gray on us early this year. It sidetracked us. We were feeling a little bitter. We wanted to bitch about the unfortunate bouts of mid-western weather we have to put up even though we know we're whining and agree that, yes, complaining about the weather is boring.

But then that big old settlement of gray moved back into the sky above us. It makes everything look a little murky. There's been too many northern air masses forcing us to turn the heater on over the last couple weeks. I liked that it had been off since June. But the change between summer and autumn was horribly abrupt. It's a little embarrassing actually.

But we're ready for this year's batch of slush, gloom and cold winds that truly suck! We're putting our phenology hats on and becoming a "citizen scientist" observers on the National Phenology Network. For real. We'll report our seasonal data findings here. Our family phenology journal for this winter and spring promises to make Aldo Leopold's look petty.

Manny Farber On Howard Hawks' Red River

Very excited to see Library of America has just published a new anthology of Manny Farber's film criticism. Not only because I've cultivated, as book collector and reader, something of a fetish for many of Library of America's finely crafted hardcover titles. (Though it should be noted that their Farber anthology is not part of the regular Library of America series and come with "its own unique format and binding.") But because Farber's writing on film is so striking in its originality and finely stylized acuteness. His film writings ignore things like plot summations in favor of these brilliant, finally crafted declarative bursts. Sometimes it's a dazzling paragraph like this one about Howard Hawks' "ingeniously lyrical" Western from 1948, Red River:

Red River as a comment on frontier courage, loyalty and leadership, is romantic, simple-minded mush, but an ingeniously lyrical film nonetheless. The story is of the first trip from Texas to the Abilene stockyards is a feat of pragmatic engineering, working with weather, space, and physiognomy. The theme is how much misery and brutality can issue from a stubbornly obsessed bully (John Wayne, who barks his way through the film instead of moving), while carving an empire in the wilderness. Of the one-trait characters, Wayne is a sluggish mass being insensitive and cruel-minded on the front of the screen; Joanne Dru is a chattering joke, even more static than Wayne, but there is a small army of actors (Clift, John Ireland) keyed in lyrically with trees cows, and ground.

A Few Notes On Home Interiors, Hardwood Floors and the Accoustics of Place

Went back to Bay Village, Ohio this past weekend with Cathy and the girls. It's my old hometown and my parents still live in the old house I grew up in. I shared my old bedroom with Abby, which since my Mom is what you might call an interior design hobbyist, no longer looks anything like my room did when I stopped being its sole occupant. It's got what I'd describe as a Cape Cod cottage feel to it. Rustic with a hint of a welcoming beach. Lake Erie is less than a 10-minute walk away, after all.

The whole house has this rustic cottage feel to it now. I'm still not used to it. My Mom's a bit of an art and craft show junkie. She'll go and buy things like folksy Halloween figurines made from twigs or antique Kris Kringle's that look quaintly Pennsylvania Dutch. Where once most of our house was covered in carpet, the two main floors are now entirely hardwood. Without the carpet to absorb sound, the acoustics of the house have radically changed. More echo. Voices carry further. The house creaks more.

I was more attentive to the sounds around my parent's place this visit. I was trying to capture them with my video camera and microphone. Some representations of the sounds that best defined certain places in and around my parent's place. I've always liked the fact that a thin strand of woods (thick and enchanted when I was a child though sadly neutered of most of its trees now) is all that separates my parent's home from the local public elementary school. It's where my two older brothers and I attended school back in 70s. It has a couple playgrounds on either end of it, and when you're sitting on the porch off my parent's room you can't help but be charmed by the sound of playground chatter gently drifting over the trees.

It's become this kind of culturally shared sonic cliche, a nostalgic signifier, the sound of children playing on a playground. You hear it, and Hollywood audience tests have no doubt proven, that over 90% of us feel this particular sound is indicative of something both innocent and wistful. It gives us a joyful ache and our response to it is practically Pavlovian. None of which should detract from just how great this sound really and truly is at its most authentic. I like that a live soundtrack of playground chatter has been playing a 180 school-day gig behind my parents house for several decades now. It's one of the main protagonists in the soundscape I spent my formative years in and I don't think it's too far a stretch to imagine how it played a key role in shaping my own fascinations with ambient sound and sound design.

Autumn Rising

Something to do with all this late August rain and the quirky little cold front that's mischievously mimicking October. There's a more then a little autumn creep in the air this weekend.

Guralnick, Elvis and YouTube

I've been thinking a lot about Peter Guralnick's amazing Elvis Presley biography since finishing it last week. One of Guralnick's gifts as a biographer is his ability to completely disappear behind the narrative. The storytelling throughout the two volumes of his Elvis biography are guided by the words of Elvis, his family, friends, girlfriends, gurus, doctors and the objects and documents that surrounded them. You get to know and appreciate the accomplishments and shortcomings of an Elvis blissfully free of all the pop-culture detritus (not entirely unjustified) that's cluttered so many assessments of Presley.

Presley's unmaking came in the form of an intense four-year slide into polypharmacy and its attending dependence on a near grotesque amount of medications readily administered by celebrity smitten doctors. The pathologists who examined the lab results from Elvis's autopsy found, according to Guralnick, "the detection of fourteen drugs in Elvis' system, ten in significant quantity. Codeine appeared at ten times the therapeutic level, methaqualone (Quaalude) in an arguably toxic amount, three other drugs appeared to be on the borderline of toxicity taken in and of themselves." You could have gotten high just licking Elvis the dude was so pumped full of drugs.

I find it fascinating that Elvis' cultural ascendancy coincided with (and was propelled along by) the spread of home televisions into the living rooms of large swaths of the U.S. That's where so many people first saw him. It used to be that catching a glimpse of any of this footage after it first aired meant you were either a media scholar happily burrowing through an archive or simply lucky enough to catch a repeat of the original.

Now, of course, a pretty sizable chunk of Elvis video culled from TV guest appearances, specials and movie clips is being posted on YouTube, Google Video and other video hosting sites. A huge spectrum of televised popular culture is available online, legally or not. I'm smitten with the idea about the potential this has to democratize media access with Youtube and other file hosting sites acting as informal (and unstable) archives. Sometimes a copyright holder will go after these videos and hosting sites like YouTube will dutifully remove the video at the copyright holder's request often ignoring the fair use considerations of the poster. I have no idea how aggressive Lisa Marie and the Estate of Elvis Presley are about challenging copyright infringement and fair use but there's a lot of Elvis clips out there.

In any case, in '68 Elvis made Christmas special for NBC. The producers were committed to getting Elvis back to his roots. He hadn't performed live in years and his recording output over that same time had largely consisted of schlocky soundtrack albums. They brought in Scotty Moore, the guitarist who played on Elvis's seminal Sun recordings from 54-55 among others to capture a kind of informal jam for the program. Here's a great, smoking clip from the '68 special on NBC of Elvis performing a spirited version of That's Alright Mama.