mstornadox

[mstornadox]

You know when you come across a thing that you immediately want to share with someone, but that someone is dead? Yeah.

My brother died about 10 years ago. He loved this movie. He loved Chicago. He loved all kinds of music and music criticism. He watched SNL from the beginning. Giving him this book before he bought it himself would have been a coup.

I wish that he were alive to read it or that it had been published before he died. But we are not living in those worlds. Instead, i am crying while adding it to my TBR. Later, I’ll share this with my family. Maybe we’ll do a group read. For now, though, i will mourn my brother and that he never had the chance to read this book nor read this review.

Daniel de Visé’s ‘The Blues Brothers’

I'm in the home stretch of my 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at the TUALATIN public library TOMORROW (June 22). After that, it's LONDON (July 1) with TRASHFUTURE'S RILEY QUINN and then a big finish in MANCHESTER on July 2.

I picked up Daniel de Visé's The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic at LA's Diesel Books; it was on the receiving table I sat next to as I signed books after a book-tour reading, and I snuck peeks at the back cover while I chatted with the long line of attendees:

https://danieldevise.com/product/the-blues-brothers-an-epic-friendship-the-rise-of-improv-and-the-making-of-an-american-film-classic

By the time the line was cleared, there was no question that I was going to buy this book, even though it wasn't formally for sale for a couple days (the bookstore staff were kind enough to make an exception for me, not least because I promised them that I wouldn't get a chance to read it for quite some time as I flitted from city to city on the rest of the tour).

Like many people of my generation, I grew up with The Blues Brothers. I taped the movie off of TV when I was about 14 and literally wore the tape out in the next four years, re-watching and re-re-watching the movies on that tape – Animal House, The Blues Brothers and Spinal Tap – so many times that I can still just about recite those movies verbatim, more than 30 years later.

The Blues Brothers is sunk so deep into my psyche that I don't know that I ever questioned why they were so embedded in my outlook. I don't know if I can even tell you when I first saw the movie. Certainly, my friend-group was very into the movie, and my best friend and I went as Jake and Elwood on multiple Hallowe'ens at the Rocky Horror Picture Show at Toronto's Roxy Theatre, until it became such a cliche for us that we felt the need to mix it up and dress up at zombie Jake and Elwood.

But beyond the movie, I was taken with the Blues Brothers' music. I didn't know much about blues, boogie woogie and other roots music before the Blues Brothers came into my life. The combination of the Blues Brothers movie and its sound-track sent me on a treasure hunt for music by the band, its musical guests, and the artists whose song they covered. By the time I was 20, I'd amassed a vast collection of used records, tapes and CDs featuring Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Willy Mabon, The Chips, Floyd Dixon and more. Soon, I was leaping from one artist to others. I found an incredible Pop Staples/Steve Cropper/Albert King collaboration "Jammed Together":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sarzs8VRSg

Within a few hops, I'd found my way to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and thence to the immortal James Cotton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl4IcMlrJwM

I started skipping Rocky Horror to see the house band at Chicago's on Queen Street, and from there found my way to the weekend jams at Grossman's:

https://torontobluessociety.com/venue/grossmans-tavern-2/

It's not an overstatement to say that The Blues Brothers altered my life, changing the music I listened to and the way I understood the musical ancestry of everything that went into my ears. Indeed, the effects that The Blues Brothers had on my life are so pervasive that I effectively stopped noticing them. When I put on a Memphis Slim album, it doesn't occur to me that the reason that music is on my hard-drive has something to do with that worn-out VHS cassette in my parents' living room in the 1980s.

Standing there at the counter at Diesel Books for an hour, sneaking peeks at the back cover of de Visé's book, set me to considering exactly how this weird and remarkable phenomenon came to be. I knew a little, of course – my friends and I used to trade the information that Aykroyd came from a family of famous Ontario Tories the same way we would have gossiped had his father been a famous serial-killer. And no one could escape some of the more salacious details of Belushi's death, though I absorbed most of what I knew via one of the greatest short stories I've ever read, Bradley Denton's "Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians," about Belushi and Lenny Bruce leading a revolt in Comedian Hell:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calvin_Coolidge_Home_for_Dead_Comedians

So I bought a copy off the receiving table, straight out of the warehouse box, and I've finally gotten around to reading it, and holy moly is it fascinating! I confess that in the months since I brought the book home and stuck it on the TBR shelf, I'd mostly forgotten why I'd picked it up and had started to view it as a book full of production trivia, and when I picked it up this week, it was with an eye to skimming it quickly before putting it out at the curb in my Little Free Library. Instead, I found myself utterly engrossed in a brilliantly told, brilliantly researched tale that left me with a much deeper understanding of – and appreciation for – the cultural phenomenon that I was (and am) swept up in.

De Visé devotes the first third of the book to snappy, revealing biographies of Belushi and Aykroyd, who grew up in very different milieux, and were of very different temperaments, but who both found their way into comedy just as the tradition of Borscht Belt comics and variety shows were giving way to a younger, weirder kind of comedy, a mixture of Monty Python, National Lampoon and improv.

These biographical sketches are short, but they don't shy away from nuance – Belushi's parents, for example, are simultaneously painted as loving and also reckless and self-involved. De Visé gives the lion's share of attention to Belushi, but he doesn't stint on detail about Aykroyd, strongly implying that "Danny" is on the spectrum, with a deep collection of "special interests" and a deep discomfort with eye contact that accounts for habit of wearing sunglasses.

As the two men find their way into various pioneering comedy projects – Second City, National Lampoon radio shows – they start to inch towards Lorne Michaels, and thus to each other. As de Visé painstakingly traces the ups and downs of their comedy careers, he paints a vivid picture of the wild swings of talented, striving artists at the start of their careers. By the time we get to the SNL chapters, the show itself becomes the star, and its rocky early days strongly echo the struggles of the comedians we've followed to its stage.

The actual production story of The Blues Brothers movie doesn't start until more than halfway through the narrative. By that time, we've been set up with the way that filmmaking, comedy, popular culture, and politics have all changed to make The Blues Brothers movie a possibility. De Visé shows us how Belushi had won over a long list of household names in the entertainment industry, and how Aykroyd's meticulous, obsessive nature honed and directed Belushi's wild talent.

The actual production of, and reception to, The Blues Brothers movie arrives in the book as a kind of extended climax and denouement, and yes, there are tons of funny bits of production trivia and gossip in this section. From winning over the mayor of Chicago (who reversed a decades-long policy of all-but-total prohibitions on filming permits in the city) to dropping a Ford Pinto thousands of feet, to the garage where, every night, dozens of surplus police cars that had been crashed that day were refurbished and gotten into shape to be crashed again the next day.

And while all of this is going on, de Visé gives us a vivid portrayal of Belushi's spiraling addiction, the disease that is killing him right there, in front of everyone who loves him. That story carries over into the film's aftermath, as it is laboriously cut from more than three hours (it was originally intended to be shown with an intermission!) and released to hostile critics and an adoring public.

These are the final days of Belushi, something we all know and can see coming. But even as Belushi approaches his final days, we learn how The Blues Brothers movie had created a legacy. It was Aykroyd who got Belushi into the blues, and the schtick they did about wanting to preserve this music from a world that was set to bury it and forget it wasn't just for the movie.

Aykroyd and Belushi wanted to bring the music back. They couldn't stand that the likes of Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and James Brown were playing county fairs and half-full night clubs. They wanted the music to escape from history and live again. And they succeeded. In a "where are they now" coda straight out of the closing credits of Animal House, de Visé documents how the artists featured in the movie – and the musical traditions they represented – experienced a massive revival following the film's release, which the musicians themselves credit to the movie.

Which is where I came in, I suppose. That's how I got here, in this form, with a hard drive full of R&B, blues, country swing, jazz, boogie woogie and jump blues that vie with Talking Heads for play in my shuffle.

This isn't a book about a movie; it's a rich and engrossing tale of an extraordinary creative collaboration that found an unlikely foothold at just the right time and place. It's a sensitive, funny, and revealing account of Belushi, Aykroyd, and the comedians, impresarios and friends in their orbit. Even if you didn't wear out a VHS cassette and memorize the whole damned movie, you will find something surprising and delightful in these pages.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/1060-west-addison#the-new-oldsmobiles-are-in-early-this-year

[mstornadox]

[mstornadox]

It’s a matter of scale. AO3 has two major advantages over library catalogs, inching the Library of Congress:

There is only one (1) set of canonical tags. Keywords and phrases supplied by the writers are wrangled into the canonical list of tags or kept as Freeform tags. Non-English canonical tags will be translated into English.

It has a user-friendly interface that supports its tag wrangling.

Most library catalogs do tag wrangling for subjects, names, locations, and more. It’s called authority control. People get together and propose new headings and tweak existing ones. It can be political and contentious.

The Library of Congress (LC) maintains several tag sets (i.e. authorities) that are shared freely with the world and used by many many many libraries. Even non-US libraries.

These LC authorities were first created in the 1800s to facilitate the research needs of Congresspeople (hence a big focus on law) and for discovering items in the US copyright repository. LC authorities will never meet all of the needs of every library. It does not even meet the needs of the other big federal libraries, such as National Library of Medicine, who maintain their own specialized sets of terms.

There are thousands of authorities out there, usually for specific subject areas and audiences. Catalogers regularly add terms from multiple authorities, such as LCSH, Sears, FAST, MeSH, Homosaurus, and AAT, to the same catalog record. We even add local terms, like freeform tags.

And then there are all of the other authorities maintained by different countries and in different languages. WikiData is working on linking terms across many of these authorities. For example, look at the Identifiers section on the entry for Mary Cassatt.

Library catalog data is presented in three main public interfaces: the local online catalog; a discovery layer that searches the catalog, research databases and other external sources; and in union catalogs that search multiple library catalogs in 1 place, such as WorldCat. Each of these may handle and display authorities differently. Some of them will choose to work like AO3 and display the original tags in a record but use the canonical one for searching. Other libraries may decide to only display and search on the canonical tags. It depends on the capabilities of the library catalog software as well as the different interfaces.

I’m glossing over a lot of details that also affect library date, like catalog record structure, call numbers and shelf locations, inherent biases in classification systems, library vendor mergers, and the variety of local cataloging practices.

TL;DR: AO3 has 1 specialized set of tags in 1 language searchable in 1 interface. Libraries, on the other hand, use multiple sets of tags in many languages. There may have different search interfaces, each of which could handle tags and search results differently.

at a conference I attended recently, a researcher pointed to the difficulty of finding material in archives because so much depends on the metadata and the terminology used to describe things changes over time. "it would be so helpful," the researcher said, "if I typed 'lesbian' into the library of congress database, it would also show me results that were categorised in the 50s, when the materials were interpreted as 'intimate female friendships'"

which is what tag wrangles at Archive Of Our Own do incredibly effectively: searching for "omegaverse" also leads to "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "alternate universe: a/b/o" and so on. but ao3 achieves this frankly incredible categorisation and indexing system by the power of countless volunteers putting in hours and hours of unpaid and unthanked free time, and it's completely understandable that most archives do not have that kind of infrastructure, but also how incredible that a fan-run website has better searchability, classification, and accessibility than the library of congress

[mstornadox]

The sound of meowing 🐈‍⬛

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This post is beautiful.

Choose to be kind. Embrace the cringe and stop harshing on someone else’s mellow

i. there's this video of a guy dancing on his tiptoes. i will begrudgingly admit the song is kind of catchy actually. i don't think it's the worst song i've ever heard. he seems passionate about it. but it is embarrassing, how he's dancing.

ii. you know where this story is going, unfortunately, and so do i.

iii. three weeks ago i had to drag half a dead rabbit out of my dog's mouth. i was just recently discussing how cruel things feel lately. that the way the world is shifting feels mean. three days ago, a random woman rolled down her window to snap at me because she missed her turn. this is now routine.

iv. 11 years ago in october, i made a post about how we shouldn't make fun of people for doing brave, vulnerable things. it has over 400k notes. people - at the time - seemed to generally agree with me. we have all felt shy and insecure when we share an intimate part of ourselves. we have heard someone at a concert say "that's fucking embarrassing" and said to ourselves - oh, this person is unsafe to be vulnerable in front of. we have said i can't act like that in public. we have left our art and passion in the dark. i think there will never be enough graveyard space for the art we have killed because what if others shame me for it.

v. the thing i was bullied for in high school was because i was a "predatory lesbian." a popular girl i'd literally never spoken to just decided she didn't like me and announced i was "stalking" her. to this day i have no idea what motivated this - i think i was just shy and poor and awkward and ugly. the perfect target. what they don't really ever show in movies is how quickly it moves, how suddenly strange people in the hallways are attacking you about it. they also don't show you that the bullies get this strange ... glee out of it. like, it's fun for them. it's enrichment. everyone else is in on the joke. suck it up, kid.

vi. so far, from what i have seen, creators that stand up for the musician all seem to have the same story: when i asked why we're bullying a random guy, people actually got mad that i asked. i've had similar things happen to me when i ask for us to be less comfortable with our anonymous cruelty. when an internet stranger says "be kind, it saves lives" - people find it funny to say fuck you i hope everyone kills themselves. pages and pages of people saying the same bullshit. sitting in their little caves, eating their own humor. it's just genuinely exhausting. the natural endpoint of "cringe culture" is that even kindness is cringe-worthy.

vii. loneliness is an epidemic. but where are you going to make your community? call your representative. go back to bed about it.

viii. due to how i was raised, i am always confused by cruelty. i understand the american isolationist belief "i can do whatever i want" - sure. but why wouldn't you want to be kind? i have lived too many bad things. i cannot be the epicenter of someone else's bad dream.

ix. it's just that if we were going to bully someone relentlessly, why is it never the healthcare CEOs. why isn't it the fascists. why isn't it, like, someone who you could at least argue "deserves" it. why is it always just some guy in socks singing a pretty mid song? or a person that doesn't look like you, just, like existing.

x. it's just that i think people enjoy doing it. they want to do it because they get some kind of masturbatory release from it - like a shrug or a splinter, they all seem to say the same thing - come on, it's funny.

xi. the world is sometimes beautiful, and sometimes you make something. the world is sometimes terrible, and you are worried they won't accept what your hands can wring. you open the instagram comments and they're still saying all sorts of shit to just - like - a normal guy. and some part of you thinks: if that was me. good lord. if that was me i'd -

xii. somewhere there is a graveyard. someone is already burying their hopes and dreams.

[mstornadox]

This works best when the benevolent dictator shares the list of activities, including which ones are mandatory and which ones are optional, BEFORE the trip.

the secret to organising any kind of trip with your friends is to become the benevolent dictator. do NOT wait for everyone to provide a consensus on things before you book anything. do it and then ask for feedback after. do not ask people what they would like to do just tell them what is happening and let them all nod along like the sheep they are. this is the ONLY way to coordinate a group of adults in their 20s/30s

[mstornadox]

Calling it now—Billie Piper’s character will be revealed to be one or more of these crack options:

The Valeyard

Bad Wolf

The mysterious “The Boss”

Rosie playing a prank (bored because she shows up in the episode and then has nothing to do)

Chameleon

First in a montage of Nu Who’s companions: Rose, Mickey, Martha, Donna, Amy, Rory, River, Clara, Bill, Nardole, Dan, Graham, Ryan, Yasmin, Ruby, and Belinda

The TARDIS, who needs more adventures with 15

A hiccup in the regeneration process

Then reverts to Ncuti Gatwa or Jodie Whitaker or Jo Martin as The Doctor

[mstornadox]

Gold stars when the kidnapped person is convinced that no one is coming for them, so they becoming the Most Annoying Captive Ever in order to save themself. Villain takes a long look at the hero, figures what is happening, and <validation> happens.

stuff I like

- when the person kidnapped by the villain is all ‘no one’s going to come for me’ and 

- someone does, but it’s the person they’d least expect

- EVERYONE COMES because wow, maybe I am depressed because I didn’t think I knew this many people, much less that they liked me

- no one comes and the villain gets pissed on their captive’s behalf and treats them better than their former associates did

- they rescue themselves and everyone’s so impressed but the person yells because I AM CAPABLE AND YOU SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST NOTICED I’D BEEN KIDNAPPED

- they get rescued by a deus ex machina, preferably their dad/mom/grandma/old associate who is exponentially cooler than the heroes 

basically, I like it when people get rescued and get validation

[mstornadox]

Please rise for our new national anthem

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Photograph of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in France

Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal OfficerSeries: Photographs of American Military Activities

Hundreds of African-American women in uniform stand in rows on a public square in Rouen, France.  People watch from the buildings above.

[mstornadox]

For your TBR: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

istg i'll see ppl say shit like "im fine with media depicting abuse/rape/whatever as long as it isnt glorifying/romanticizing it" then turn around and say cannibalism is a metaphor for love and that murder conveys devotion. i hate to inform you but youre romanticizing violence

[mstornadox]

Just realized that I have been living under a fake rule:

Thou canst have only one CPAP machine at a time.

But. That is demonstrably false. I have old CPAP machines waiting to be taken to the electronics recycler. What if I had two active CPAP machines—one in the bedroom and one in the living room. So whether i sleep on the couch or the bed, I have a chance of getting good sleep?

My sleep hygiene is currently fucked, but this would help improve my life a bit.

[mstornadox]

fuck the episode recap. the couple were not taking their anger out on each other. one of them defended herself when the other kept blaming her for everything that went wrong. he was sullen and passive aggressive and spitefully unhelpful.

sometimes i get stressed watching reality shows featuring couples with a toxic relationship dynamic. the editors and showrunners may think it makes “good tv,” but it makes me fast forward through their scenes.

[mstornadox]

sometimes i get stressed watching reality shows featuring couples with a toxic relationship dynamic. the editors and showrunners may think it makes “good tv,” but it makes me fast forward through their scenes.

[mstornadox]

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[mstornadox]

Czechia and Australia were robbed