Stolen Meltdown

In lieu of other inspiration I'm stealing this "Friday Meltdown" idea from Timmy at Surfdom whose made quite the tradition of it.

Watching: Watching some classic New York Dolls video at YouTube, I'd love to see them later this month but may not be poss. Anyway. I've blogged about lead singer David Johansen's latter day blues reinvention with The Harry Smiths before (in fact, it was, like, my second evah post or something.) Here he is on Smokestack Lightning with Hubert Sumlin.



Oh and some German rap about football, just cuz:



Reading: "Das Attentant Auf Amenemhet I. Und Die Erste Agyptische Koregenshaft" von Karl Jansen-Wilkeln. German Quickly: A Grammar for Reading German by April Wilson and Sinuhe, The Bible and the Patriarchs by Miroslav Barta.

Before all this uni work fell on me in the last few weeks the last thing I read was one of my new very favourite books, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets by David Simon. The inspiration for the TV show Homicide:Life on the Streets, although the pure Simon-ian vision is best expressed in the shows he himself produced, the extraordinary The Wire and The Corner. Simon was a Baltimore Sun crime reporter who spent a year (I guess the term we would use now is "imbedded") with the Baltimore PD homicide squad. This is their story. Wow. Just wow.

Listening to: I bought the new album of Dylan covers by Bryan Ferry, Dylanesque. It's really rather OK although I wish he'd been a bit more adventurous with the song choices. And the late 2006 Raven Records release (hello Raven? Get a freakin' website already) of a smoking 1979 Bobby Bare live gig, Down and Dirty ... Plus.