Shango

Artist: Shango

LP: Shango

Song: "Mama Lion"

[ listen ]

Song: "Hey Jude"

[ listen ]

This morning I woke up from a terrifying nightmare in which Seattle was being invaded by aliens! They had been hovering over the city for months and had released a strange pixelated-looking black cloud over the Puget Sound, but everyone had gotten used to all that. Now for some reason the aliens were infiltrating the city on long, slender vehicles. They were driving up from out of the water and onto all the city streets! They hadn't done anything weird yet, but somehow we all knew they were up to no good. I had just retreated into the safety of my attic bedroom with my sister and some friends when I suddenly woke up. I was instantly relieved to realize that it had just been a bad dream and that the aliens hovering over Seattle hadn't come up out of the Puget Sound and into the city after all. It took another minute or two before I was able to comprehend that I was laying in my bedroom in Ballard and that there weren't actually any aliens. That part was a dream too! Whew. 

This terrific Shango record from A&M Records in 1969 is one of the things I picked up at Jive Time Records when I traded in a bunch of LPs that I was clearing out of my collection. The album was produced by Jerry Riopelle, who later released a couple of albums that still remain in my collection. You can find info on Shango from expert Dave Silverstein here, along with some informative followup comments here. If anyone has more info on the group, please feel free to chime in! And please also remind me to never engage in one of the Shango dances—where men are blindfolded, the machete is swung, and the head of the cock is severed.

Supermax

Artist: Supermax

LP: Fly With Me

Song: "African Blood"

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This morning I was starting to have a lovely and elaborate gay Busby Berkeley dream where at first all I could see was a ring of champagne glasses being filled with bubbly pink champagne, then the "camera" pulled back to reveal that the bottles were being poured by debonair gentlemen dancers in 1930s attire—but without any shirts on! ...and just then my alarm-clock radio flipped on and I woke up. I was pissed! Anyway, this third Supermax album, released in 1979, is one of the things I picked up during my trip to Austin, TX back in October. The group was the project of leader Kurt Hauenstein, "Fly With Me" was their international breakthrough LP, and Supermax was the first mixed-race group to tour in South Africa and Venda in the 1970s, which evidently caused quite a stir. You can read about Supermax on Wikipedia here, and find the group's year-by-year biography, discography, lots of photos and other neat things on their official website here. Unfortunately, the website doesn't explain what bass guitar player Kenneth Taylor is wearing on his head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Scaredy-Cat Photographer Lady

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The Scaredy-Cat Photographer Lady

Saturday, June 19, 2010 at 6:00am

I know this isn't technically a blog about dreams, but I had such a horribly strange and vivid nightmare this morning, I felt compelled to write it down:

I was walking with a friend (not sure who, doesn't matter) through a posh older urban residential neighborhood w/ big trees lining the street when we came across a man walking a small dog. We stopped and began talking with him casually. After a while we noticed a large and stuffy older woman approaching with a big black poodle on a leash. Her hair was pinned up under a fancy old-fashioned hat, she wore a long dark brown fur coat and had a camera around her neck. With her poodle pulling at the leash, the eccentric woman was following behind a humongous gray, brown and black tiger-striped pussycat (like, as big as a medium-sized suitcase). As she approached the cat, she would make her poodle lunge so that the cat would freak out by hissing, bristling its hair, and making an angry, frightening face. Whenever the cat did that, the woman would quickly snap a succession of pictures of the cat with her camera. We all assumed she was a famous photographer who specialized in pictures of terrified cats. When the cat finally relaxed and began to wander away, the woman would follow it with her poodle and, again, make the dog lunge at the cat. The cat would bristle and hiss again and the woman would take a bunch of pictures.

This went on for a while as we all watched, until finally the man we were talking to, the one with the small dog, addressed the woman: "Ma'am, I want you to know that I can not condone what you're doing to that cat!"—to which the stuffy woman answered haughtily, "I just love the way the mouth of the cat looks when it's frightened—the look of primal fear!"... and she made her poodle lunge once more toward the large pussycat. But this time the cat hissed, bristled, and raised its paws up and scratched down the front of the woman's right side from her shoulder to her waist. We could see that the cat had ripped four vertical stripes in the woman's brown fur coat. As the cat meandered away, the woman stood stunned for a second as we all watched her in silence. Gradually, blood began seeping through the four long rips in the woman's coat, and then the blood began squirting out in long vertical ribbons. We ran toward the woman as she was backing toward the stone steps of an old brownstone behind her, muttering to herself, "Oh my, it's been a long time since this sort of thing has happened..." As we helped her sit down and were fumbling for our cell phones to call 911, a petite dark-haired girl in her early 20s who had seen the entire episode came rushing over to give advice: "Ma'am, as a professional ventriloquist, I recommend you call Dr. Thomas O'Neal." The eccentric woman, weakening, replied faintly but firmly, "Don't call me a doctor—call the hospital. Quickly!" And then I woke up.