The sound is really crappy, but watch from 4:08 to 4:54, and let's get Hells Angels Forever and watch this!

Interviewer: Are you afraid of the Hell's Angels?

Garcia: Sure. Sure.

Interviewer: Why?

Garcia: Because they're scary, man, you know. They're all big, you know, and strong, and good in all the violent spaces.

Office daydream # 47

Why are the Libyan rebels shooting down aircraft from my office chair?

I came across the following in a book of Fairfield Porter's art criticism -

"The Boston of the end of the nineteenth century was created by Sargent as an Anglophile Boston that considered itself a province of London....Boston, which felt itself to be (and with some justice), certainly the equal, and possibly the superior to any other American city as a capital of culture. The Bostonians who admired and lionized Sargent identified themselves with English civilization: they had no awe of France....In Boston there may have existed a small climate of opinion as to artistic standards that did not exist in New York or Philadelphia"

What struck me is how far this popularized, culturally influential image of Boston - the Brahmins, the James's, of a refined sensibility and cultural tastemaking - is so far from the popularized, but no less influential image of Boston we have today - the dominance of 'the Southie,' a city whose privilege is seen as foreign, and whose heart is the working class, the uneducated, the proud and clannish, the uncouth. Certainly demographics and economics play a large role here, but there's more to it, I think. Something about the democratization of cultural elitism, and the authenticity associated with representing the working class experience in the arts.

But as I always say, don't hate the player - hate the game.

You know, if I put my mind to it, I could probably eat 50 of these Lorna Doones. I mean, these things are Lena Horne good!

And though I find the following tidbit about the book Lorna Doone from wikipedia interesting, it's worth asking whether the opinion of your average 1906 Yalie is really a testament to a thing's popularity? I mean, by this rubric, a favorite leisure activity is "ballooning", and the dances sweeping our nation are, in descending order, the grizzly bear, the turkey trot, the bunny hug, and the camel walk.

"It received acclaim from many of Blackmore's contemporaries, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and Margaret Oliphant. A favourite among female readers,[1] it is also popular among males, and was chosen by male students at Yale in 1906 as their favourite novel.[2]"