My local bar is open through the hurricane ...
... (complete with at least one crappy-weather special), which is a welcome surprise and brings to mind yet another weather-appropriate Bob Dylan song that's better than "Hurricane."
© Peter Rozovsky 2011
Labels: hurricanes, images, miscellaneous, Philadelphia views
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 12:07 AM
29 Comments:
Sounds like a solid place. Don't be a foul weather friend now...
I've alluded to the place before. I'd gone out to see if I could shoot some pictures in the rain, and lo, the place was open. It's where I discovered Dogfish Head. I've eaten boar, venison, alligator, and rabbit there, but no birds, as far as I can remember, so I am no fowl-weather friend.
Not curious in the least about which Bob Dylan song I had mind, are you? It's not "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," by the way, though that is also better than "Hurricane."
Congratulations on the bar being open during the floods.
What Dylan song is it? Not "Blowing in the Wind," either, is it?
Alligator, I ask? Does it taste like chicken?
Peter
This blog is all about nuance. I wasn't even going to ask the question. I assumed everyone would know the song. E A B standard blues progression. I bar the B because I'm not a very good guitar player.
Kathy, I should have made this a contest. I had forgotten all about "Blowin' in the Wind."
"Buckets of Rain" occurred to me early in the evening and, when I found the bar was open, "Shelter From the Storm" naturally came to mind.
I was going to reply "tastes like chicken" to my mother's question "Alligator????" Instead, I said, "It wsa either him or me."
Adrian, I know a lot of Dylan songs are I-IV-V, but I don't know which one you had in mind. And I don't mean "Subterranean Homesick Blues," with its "Don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows."
This may not be the moment to mention that old mixed blessing... may you have a fair wind behind
you.
I've just discovered (thanks to hmsrichmond.org) that in naval circles to ask for the butter to be
passed one might say "put a fair wind behind the butterdish".
"Blow the wind southerly" is a fine ditty for such stormy times?
Ha! A good thing no well-disposed Irishmen or women sent me on my way yesterday.
Did that naval expression apply only to the butter dish?
You're looking for weather, here's some feckin' weather
I have heard that wonderful song by my countryman more than once over the past few days. It's the unquestioned champ of hurricane songs, I'd say.
It's sunny in Philadelphia now, by the way. The storm was severe, but I think it passed through a few hours more quickly than forecasters predicted.
I'm afraid that was the extent of my knowledge on the subject of old salt's and their butterdishes.
The choice of "Blow the Wind Southerly" becomes surrealistic if you look at the link where the refrain
"My lads' at the bar, at the bar, at the bar" kicks in.
BTW, I was terrified by what I saw on TV, so I expect it will take a while for people affected to settle back to normal.
"pteratunes.org.uk/Music/Music/Lyrics/BlowWind.html"
Peter
Hard rain is E A B.
Shelter From The Storm is only two chords. If I recall correctly E and A.
Only The Guardian is admitting that the warnings for New York were completely overblown and the storm there was an utter anticlimax. Anderson's Cooper's There Goes My Emmy expression was priceless.
I realise this might get tiresome very quickly, but if we're talking weather related songs, how about David Bowie's version of wild is the wind?
Just be grateful I didn't link to the Johnny Mathis original. But perhaps you'd prefer Nina Simone's jazzy version of it?
Tales, “Put a fair wind behind what have you” has wider application than butter dishes, and I will apply it widely, whatever old sailors might think.
Oh, yes, “My lads at the bar” makes "Blow the Wind Southerly" especially appropriate.
The hurricane kicked up a big fuss in North Carolina, but here it was not so bad.
Adrian, ask your friend Tim Hallinan what he thinks of Anderson Cooper and CNN/ I think forecasters overestimated the duration rather than force of the hurricane, and they may have underestimated its speed as well. Things were pretty hairy here in Philadelphia, but I think the peak had passed by 2 a.m. rather than 4-7 a.m. That, in turn, might have meant that Irene fizzled by the time it got to New York, to the disappointment of Anderson Cooper.
You might throw in a B7 on "Hard Rain." Was just playing "All Along the Watchtower" on my ax, and I realized its last lines are
"Two riders were approaching / And the wind began to howl." Dylan is a walking weather forecast.
Here are Hallinan's relevant comments:
Part of the problem is that American television news is so unprincipled. Every year they run the same terrible footage of child prostitutes, taken in Phnom Penh in 2002, as the center of a piece on CNN or MSNBC with a title like "House of Shame" or something equally maudlin. The fact is, they haven't spotted anything new since 2002, but why let that get in the way of a sure-fire teaser line like "Child Sex at Eleven"?
I was in Phnom Penh the last time Anderson Cooper was there, and he shot his set-up in front of the brothels of Tuol Kork, where most of the women could be charitably described as motherly. All the lighted doors were out of focus behind him. The shadows moving around could have been adults, or children, or Komodo dragons for all anyone could tell. Several bars where freelancers go to meet tourists refused to allow any woman under 5 feet, 4 inches into the bar while CNN was in town because they were terrified of some shot taken from behind of a big guy and a small woman. The most disgusting thing of all was that the whole time CNN was in Phnom Penh, the tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge leaders – who killed two million people – was finally about to get underway, the first time any of these bloodsuckers had ever been brought to account. And CNN never reported a single word about it. Not sexy enough; "Murderers of Millions Brought to Justice" is nowhere near as good as "Child Sex at Eleven."
Solo, I've only ever heard David Bowie's version, and I find it too self-consciously arty and wistful to adequately convey the terror that only those who have lived in fear of a flooded basement can know.
Peter
I was in both Phnom Penh and Havana in 2008 and I have to say I found many more sex tourists in Havana than I did in Phnom Penh, but you'll never hear a story about sex tourism in Havana because it buys into nobody's notions of what Cuba is like. All the journos and most of the writers stay in the Nacional Hotel anyway which is well away from the red light districts full of 13 year old girls (and boys), their pimps and the bribed policemen.
I bet there will be plenty such stories on television when the Castros fall, led by Anderson Cooper with ominous shots of unidentified buildings behing him.
And when those stories appear, I'll expect an undertone of blame against the U.S. for the embargo that forced such desperate measures.
Peter
Of course because of the embargo very few of the Havanan sex tourists were Americans. (Although that will change as travel becomes easier).
Most of the white guys with young Cuban girlfriends that I met in bars were Quebecois or German.
No, what I meant is that some will blame the embargo for forcing young girls into prostitution, regardless of who the clients are.
I thought this was about the storm. Not so funny when you're in the eye of it, though this was better than Isabel. You Northerners just aren't used to the average hurricane.
As for coverage of child prostitution: it's getting so you can't use it in a book any longer because people think it's common place.
Child prostitution runs a close second to the related crime of human trafficking. I don't want to sound too much like a Marxist, but I tie this to the breaking down of borders, whether in the form of the end of the Iron Curtain, or any number of free-trade agreements. Not that humans are any more depraved than they were before, but that depravity now has commercial outlets that did not exist previously.
This hurricane fooled the National Weather Service by moving faster, petering out earlier, and travelling a slightly more westely path than predicted. Oh, well. I'l find a use for the peanut butter and dried fruit that I had bought.
Human trafficking, including child prostitution means profits for some. The human are commodities, bought and sold for money. If it weren't money-making, it wouldn't exist.
Where the market exists, people making money on it, and extreme poverty and unemployment, it will exist unfortunately.
There are a lot of good-minded people trying to help and get children out of this terrible enslavement and indentured servitude but as long as it's profitable, it's hard to think of it stopping.
There is a movie coming out with Rachel Weisz playing the role of a woman who worked for the UN in Bosnia and was a whistle-blower who told of human trafficking rings which involved U.N. peacekeepers, etc. She was fired but kept on trying to help people escape.
The Boy in the Suitcase handles the theme well. So does Stuart Neville's second book, Collusion, in a different way. The danger is that as more and more writers take up the theme, it will become more and more routine.
On the other hand, maybe the writers are seen as muck-rakers, bringing up to public view some crimes that are hidden.
I think that Timothy Hallinan deals with this issue in his series set in Thailand. Also, Angela Savage writes in The Half-Child about it as well.
Hallinan talked about this in an interview I did with him a few years ago.
Post a Comment
<< Home