Saturday Stuff

As I've written before, I have this enduring fascination for a bygone era -- the 50's and earlier. That goes for the music, culture, film, books, and history of the times. I amassed a collection of this stuff while living abroad and sorely miss my stuff that I left behind and have yet to come back for. In 1996, while working in Hong Kong, I saw this film with a friend of mine named Koo (his named is hard to spell coz it's Dutch and he asked us all to call him "Koo" for short). The film was titled Swingers. And I thought it was a great and underrated film. If ever, it gave us a glimpse into the genius of Jon Favreau (for the boneheads who only know him of Iron Man fame). He not only acted in the movie with a young (weren't we all then) Vince Vaughn but he also wrote it and it was a riot in a cool sort of way. It was set during the swing revival that swept the United States in the early to mid 1990s and please when we talk about swing it's not the Teri De Sario stuff. This is the real deal with slapping upright bass guitars, bright brass filligree and mean dance steps. And so I was introduced to the music of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. I plucked out my old Tony Bennett album "Perfectly Frank" that is a tribute album to Ole Blue Eyes. The swing revival also got me into the Atomic Fireballs, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Royal Crown Revue, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, and the reinvention of the Stray Cats into the Brian Setzer Orchestra. And a little earlier, there was the 1963 limited comic book series by Alan Moore for Image that was such a cool retro story.

I mention this because in all this cleaning up closets and checking out old boxes, to my delight and relief, I found some things I thought I lost. I left some of my collection at my folks' place (my collection is over 5,000 discs and they can't all be at once place can it? In fact, I have about 300 of them left in my old apartment in NYC). In this DVD marathon that has left me with a splitting headache and seeing red, I enjoyed watching Swingers again. I pulled out my CD Soundtrack and that of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and had a blast. Bring it on, Daddy-o!

The first and best of all the BBVD albums.

Finishing reading this book. I should have been done with this before. This was what I was finishing up at the exact moment that the floodwaters of Typhoon Ondoy were rising. I only began to re-read it after acquiring a new copy the other week. Everest deals with trespassers harshly: the dead vanish beneath the snows. While the living struggle to explain what happened. And why. A survivor of the mountain's worst disaster examines the business of Mount Everest and the steep price of ambition.

In Nerdvana. One of my favorite television shows. So I'm on a marathon DVD watch the past few days. One of my fave quotes: "Ah, gravity, thou are a heartless bitch." And there's, "I understand, but it was between you and the Museum of Natural History, and frankly, you don't have dinosaurs." Bwahaha. Brilliant! Sorry, I don't buy fakes; only original stuff for me. And will do some writing as well today. Sigh the vacation is half over.