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They Call Me Naughty Lola

VERY British personal ads from the London Review of Books. All are witty, many are pants-wettingly funny. Here’s a taste …

Bald, short, fat and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite. Box no. 9612.

I’ll see you at the LRB singles night. I’ll be the one breathing heavily and stroking my thighs in the ‘art’ books. Asthmatic, varicosed F (93) seeks M to 30 with enough puff in him to push me uphill to the post office. This is not a euphemism. Box no. 4632.

I once found the perfect match in this column, but then it turned out to be an ad I’d written two years earlier that they’d forgotten to publish. Still, you have to admire my consistency. Man, 43. Consistent. Admiring. Admirable. Box no. 4321.

In a certain light I look like Robert Mitchum. In a certain light, you look like Kim Novak. More usually, I look like Shrek. More usually, you still look like Kim Novak. Yes, you’re very unlucky. Now pass me the Doritos and get over it. Box no. 3917.

My favorite Ben & Jerry’s is Acid-Boiled Bones of Divorce Lawyer. They don’t make it, but, damn, I can taste its sweet, sweet ice-creamy softness already. Bed-sit-living doctor (M, 54). Box no. 6321.

Shy, ugly man, fond of extended periods of self-pity, middle-aged, flatulent and overweight, seeks the impossible. Box no. 8623.

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And now for some REAL dancin’

I’m not much of a Joy Division fan, as I can only take so much post-industrial Midlands desolation.  But this one’s pretty good, and Ian Curtis’s stage gestures are interesting to say the least, especially when he really cuts loose at around 3:00.

You bastards might know way more about these guys, so my apologies if what follows is common knowledge.  It’s pretty widely known that Ian Curtis hanged himself of the eve of what would have been their first tour of the U.S.  Beyond that, I’ve picked up a few interesting facts over the years:

-They formed after seeing the Sex Pistols perform in Manchester.  That same gig also inspired the formation of The Buzzcocks and The Smiths.

-Their bass player developed his style of playing in the upper register because when they started out, his amp was so shitty that it wouldn’t reproduce lower notes without sputtering.

-Ian Curtis had epilepsy and based his stage moves on his seizures, to the point that his bandmates could not tell when he was having a real one.  This predictably led to some disatrous gigs.

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Whole Lotta Borrowing

Speaking of The Small Faces, here’s their take on Muddy Waters’ “You Need Love.”  You’ll note that Robert Plant, who used to run errands for The Small Faces, later put this to use in “Whole Lotta Love.”  Some music nerds give themselves wedgies over all this, but you’ve gotta concede that Jimmy Page improved it by adding one of the all-time greatest rock riffs.  Fun Fact: when JP was forming what would become Led Zeppelin, Steve Marriott was high on his list of singers until The Small Faces’ manager threatened to break his hands.

By the way, below is the single version of “Whole Lotta Love” which cut out the free-form middle section of bongos, theremin, and Robert Plant gearing up for a sneeze that never comes.  Atlantic did originally put out the whole song as a single, but radio stations would create their own versions without the middle part.  Atlantic responded by re-releasing its own edited single over the objections of the band.  So if you didn’t own the lp and listened to AM radio, this is what you usually heard:

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Whatever Games I Play

The RNRHF just released a bunch of clips from this year’s induction ceremony. As you bastards may or may not remember, I don’t give two shits about that ridiculous institution, but it did give us this performance. The Cure still sounds amazing live, and Robert Smith is promising a new Cure album this year.

The clip below is included only for his good-natured sarcasm, which made me laugh. I’m sure she meant well …