Here’s a very nice portrait of my late mother, Joanne Waffle Pratt. I believe this was taken after she had her first baby, my sister the doctor. I don’t know when studio photography done in this style fell out of fashion, but stylish and fashionable it was!
I was, for some years, a big fan of Randy Newman. My interest started with hearing his then-new album Sail Away in high school. My favorite song from the record was Political Science. I loved it so much I used the closing lyric as my high school yearbook quote. If you click here you can listen to the song, as taken from the original piece of plastic that I listened to a thousand times, so many years ago. Spring of my senior year in high school I was ecstatic when it was announced that Newman would be appearing at Symphony Hall in Boston. I took a train into the city and bought tickets at the box office for myself and my girlfriend, and it was a very memorable show.
This week, Newman will be appearing at Carnegie Hall. Last night, Newman appeared on The Colbert Report to promote the concert. Washington politics being what they presently are, I think Political Science is more timely than it was 34 years ago. Here’s the video of Newman performing the song.
Player problem? Click here.
A couple of days ago The Boston Globe had an article about a new book that Christopher Tolkien has assembled, called Children of Húrin. It’s based on fragmentary writings by his father, J.R.R. Tolkien. If the link above doesn’t work, you can read the article by clicking here.
I have an LP that is unquestionably purely J.R.R. Tolkien. His narration of “Riddles in the Dark,” from The Hobbit. The recording provided here is from August, 1952 and it’s half an hour long. It begins with the introduction of Gollum, and it ends with Gollum’s cursing of Bilbo (“Thief!”).
Audio Adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of OZ, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1961
[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/WWOZ/OZ10.mp3|titles=The Wonderful Wizard of OZ: Chapter X]
I mentioned the late British director Michael Powell again in a recent post. Now I see another blogger has posted several items about Black Narcissus.
This inspired me to transfer two scenes from the movie and splice them together. For myself, what makes Black Narcissus great is the always excellent Deborah Kerr and the absolutely breathtaking performance by Kathleen Byron. A case can be made for this cat fight being melodramatic and over-the-top, but for me it’s mesmerizing.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2010/JAN/BlackNarcissus.flv 320 240]
Click the picture to see an ad currently running in the local daily paper. I don’t know why Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead chose the name RatDog for his band, but the domain name rat-dog.com was registered six months before I bought DogRat.com in January, 2000. Some months after doing that, I received e-mail from a public relations firm in NYC asking to buy the name. I replied and said name a price, but I never heard back. Whether or not they may have been representing RatDog, I assume a certain percentage of hits my home page receives are from stoned Dead Heads who got it backwards.
