Crabwalk

Stupidest statement ever made in an interview of John Updike: This screamer from Nerve’s Will Doig:

One of the things that compels Ahmad to terrorism in this book is his hatred of America’s permissive attitude toward sex. And yet from where I stand, America seems more sexually repressed than ever. How is there such a disconnect between what he sees and what I see?

How thick would one’s blinders have to be to believe that America in 2006 is “more sexually repressed than ever”? Six inches? A foot? How ignorant of history would one have to be? Particularly if one is an editor for an Internet magazine devoted entirely to sex? Sheesh.

One of the glories of the explosion of video online is that it’s much easier to find all the exploitation films that, one day long ago, inspired young Quentin Tarantino to be a director.
My personal favorites, from a historian’s p.o.v., are the sexploitation films. They exist only to show naked and semi-naked women to the horny male masses. But they wrap that lurid purpose in a blanket of fake, finger-wagging moralism. As such, they prefigure nothing so much as contemporary daytime television.
Here are a few trailers from the 1950s and 1960s, all taken from the excellent Bedazzled. (NSFW — meaning you will spy a fairly steady stream of nipples and the occasional buttock):

• The Twisted Sex (“It explores the sexual deviations of our age and the people whose thirst for love brings them to the edge of madness!”)
• Some Like It Violent (“See how a shy and inhibited boy becomes a vicious sex killer!”)
• It’s a Sick, Sick, Sick World (“The things that women do…not for money, but for the enjoyment and pleasure that is derived from their actions!”)
• The Sex Cycle (“See girls caught in the vortex of vice!”)
• The Girl Smugglers (“The racket was smuggling! And the contraband was young girls, shipped to the states, where their bodies are used to bring cash into the racketeer’s treasury!”)

And finally, a later edition of the smut-wrapped-in-fake-morals genre: from 1967, The Girl, The Body, and The Pill. “Don’t let the size of that little pill fool you — it’s like a hydrogen bomb, exploding in the face of civilization!” That Miss Barrington, she’s pretty cute!

I love Uruguay.
It’s a strange country to inspire such devotion, I imagine. But it’s sort of the Zambia of South America: small and easily overlooked; dominated by its neighbors; once prosperous, now in rougher times; and friendly as all get out. I loved my couple of days there last fall and have secret plans to buy a house in Colonia del Sacramento and go write my novels.
Which explains this link to the Uruguayan Invasion. It was musical, not military, a la the British Invasion: For one shining moment in the 1960s, Uruguayan rock bands were the class of the continent, fueling Beatlemania-style mayhem among the youth of Argentina.
The key bands were Los Shakers and Los Mockers — who pinched the styles of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, respectively. (And were, naturally, great rivals.) First, Los Shakers, whom I absolutely love:

I have a great desire to track down a copy of La Conferencia Secreta del Toto’s Bar, which is supposedly their Sgt. Pepper’s, mixing psychedelia with candombe.
Now Los Mockers:

The Uruguayan Invasion, sadly, died out in 1973 with the start of Uruguay’s military dictatorship. Dictatorships have a way of doing that to pop music. All about “Ururock” here.

Bad Timing, a weblog devoted to the making of the first feature film in Zambian history. (Zambia is, of course, my favorite sub-Saharan nation.) With the obligatory companion blog on…the making of the film about the making of the first feature film in Zambian history. So, so meta.
I’d exchanged emails with Jabbes Mvula, the director, a few weeks back. He decided he wanted to get into filmmaking after the death of his three-year-old son in 2001. So I was very sad to read that another of his children died last month. That to me is the biggest gap between a place like Zambia and the developed world: the frequency with which people bury their dead. (I wrote a story about it back in 2004.)

Right after I post an early Pink Floyd video comes word that Syd Barrett — the band’s “troubled genius” — has died.
Syd was a strange character. For those who don’t know the history, he founded the band and wrote and sang nearly all of its early songs. But thanks to a potent admixture of schizophrenia and lysergic acid diethylamide, he lost his mind. The rest of the band gently eased him out and went on to global superstardom. For the last 30-plus years, Syd’d been a crazy man living alone in Cambridge, painting abstract canvases and living off Floyd royalties.
Because he’s gone private, Syd lived on primarily as an image — inspiring tribute songs like “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” Fans imagined him as a kindhearted child in need of protection, an injured songbird. His musical production consisted of only one good album and a bunch of unlistenable solo work, interspersed with occasional glimpses of sense. But from that body of work — and one extended exercise in mythmaking — developed a legend.
Here’s Joe Boyd, the band’s early promoter, on the Syd he knew; he makes the worthwhile and undernoted point that the band succeeded in part because Syd “was incredibly good looking: he had these dark eyes, and this curly black hair, and he was very, very appealing; girls loved him.”
(Today, that seems strange on a couple of levels. First, because the remaining band members post-Syd are, well, quite unattractive sorts; and second, because the post-Syd band and their fans are both so drearily self-conscious about how intellectual and profound they each are. When I was in eighth grade, liking Pink Floyd was a marker that I was a serious person, and it was the complete absence of fun post 1972 that eventually drove me away. So I really like the idea that the most “serious” of classic rock bands, the only one that would inspire Tom Stoppard plays, got an early edge because its lead singer was hot. On the other hand, it also gives his descent into crazy eyebrow-shaving fat man status in the 1970s a sort of awful resonance.)
I linked to a bunch of early Floyd videos a few months ago, and most of those links still work. But the best is this video of “Interstellar Overdrive” from the 1967 doc Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London.

Columns I have no desire to read in my local newspaper:

I realize many of you get mouth ulcers, but after a little studying on my part, I learned that only a lucky chosen few get them regularly, and sometimes, in droves. I’m one of the lucky ones, and ohhhh, I get them everywhere. I get them on my lip, behind my lip, in that little spot where your top lip meets your bottom lip, on my gums, inside my gums, on my tongue, under my tongue, on the roof of my mouth and yes, oh yes, even inside my throat on occasion.

Perhaps the most patronizing moment in early rock criticism: Pink Floyd appears on the BBC, May 14, 1967. Despite a pretty good (if poorly miked) rendition of “Astronomy Domine,” with Syd Barrett in full hippie regalia, they get savaged by the Viennese voice of establishment music, Hans Keller.

Syd and Roger Waters actually deal with the insulting questions (“Why has it all got to be so terribly loud? For me, frankly, it’s too loud. I just can’t bear it”) well, I thought. They seem rather amused.

I spent a lot of time searching through SEC filings not long ago, so this error is of particular note to me. (And the filing in question is still up.)

Frightening news from the housing markets:

As housing prices soared last year, an eye-popping 43% of first-time home buyers purchased their homes with no-money-down loans, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Association of Realtors…

The median first-time home buyer scraped together a down payment of only 2% on a $150,000 home in 2005, the NAR found…

[Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research] and other economists are concerned that many lenders have pushed a series of creative but potentially dangerous loans to help more Americans afford a home.

That 43% number is just staggering to me.