The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N is a charming, short novel from 1937, by Leonard Q. Ross, actual Jewish name Leo Rosten, who taught ESL in New York. It has no real plot – I think it was originally a series of short stories – but each chapter is another episode from the tribulations of Mr. Parkhill, who gamely tries to teach English to a bunch of my very distant cousins. His most remarkable student is H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, as he invariably writes his own name, in crayon, with blue outlines around the red letters. Mr. Kaplan’s English never seems to improve, but he loves class anyway:

“No, sir!” cried Mr. Kaplan impetuously. “‘Good, gooder, goodest? It’s to leff!”
“We say that X, for example, is good. Y, however, is–?” Mr. Parkhill arched an eyebrow interrogatively.
“Batter!” said Mr. Kaplan.
“Right! And Z is–?”
“High-cless!”

Mr. Kaplan always has the last word:

“Maybe isn’t ‘Heng yoursalf in resaption hall” altogadder a mistake,” Mr. Kaplan murmured dreamily. “If som pipple came to mine house dat vould maybe be exactel vat I should say.”

Rich recommended I read Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, which I think he got from Froyo, so when I saw it for $6 in Boston, but a few T stops from Boston College, where the author, Steve Almond, beats grammar into freshmen, I snapped it up, even though it was hardback and I prefer paperbacks. It turned out to be a very entertaining, breezy account of every aspect of Almond’s obsession with candy. From the prologue, “Some things you should know about the author”:

3. The author has between three and seven pounds of candy in his house at all times.
Perhaps you think I am exaggerating for effect.
I am not exaggerating for effect.
Here is a catalog of all the candy in my apartment as of right now, 3:21 p.m., July 6, 2003:

• 2 pounds minature Clark Bars
• 1.5 pounds dark chocolate-covered mint patties
• 24 bite-size peanut butter cups
• 1 pound Tootsie Roll Midgets
• 4 ounces of Altoids-like cinnamon disks
• 6 ounces cherry-flavored jellies (think budget Jujyfruits)
• A single gold-foiled milk chocolate ball with mysterious butter truffle-type filling
• 2 squares of Valrona [sic] semisweet chocolate (on my bedside table)
• 3 pieces Fleer bubblegum

I am not counting the fourteen boxes of Kit Kat Limited Edition Dark, which I have stored in an undisclosed warehouse location, nor whatever candy I might have stashed, squirrel-like, in obscure drawers.

So you can tell that he’s serious about candy. He mostly talks about all the candies he’s ever eaten, the ones he’s heard about but hasn’t eaten, the ones he used to eat that don’t exist anymore, etc. The meat (or nutmeat) of the book is where he goes on a cross-country frenzy of visiting the small regional family candy companies that still make Twin Bings and Idaho Spuds and Abba-Zabas and Five Star Bars, which he claims, convincingly, are the single greatest candy bar in existence:

There was caramel, obviously, but also roasted almonds and nuggets of dark chocolate. It was draped in a thin layer of milk chocolate. The interplay of tastes and textures was remarkable: the teeth broke through the milky chocolate shell, sailed through the mild caramel, only to encounter the smoky crunch of the almonds, and finally, the rich tumescence of the dark chocolate. You almost never see milk and dark chocolate commingled, but the effect in this bar was striking: The sweetness of the milk chocolate rushed across the tongue, played against the musky crunch of the nut, then faded. The bite finished with an intense burst of dark chocolate, softened by the butter dissolution of caramel. What I mean here: there was a temporal aspect to the bar, a sense of evanescence and persistence.

There’s also a lot of interesting history and background and whatnot, plus some sort of distressing introspection about why he likes candy so much: basically, because his family didn’t love him.

Ever since I was a little kid, when I thought “Leader of the Pack” (vrrrm! vrrrrrrm!) was the greatest song in the world, I’ve loved girl groups. They never seem to get too much respect, probably because they didn’t write their own songs, and they were mostly just manufactured by their producers. So? When the producer was Lou Christie, who cares?

The Tammys were one of Christie’s first groups, and I guess he went all-out on them. As much as I love the Bangles’ hit “Walk Like an Egyptian,” nothing can stop the Tammys’ “Egyptian Shumba” from being the greatest ancient Egypt-themed pop song of all time. Don’t even talk to me about that Steve Martin song. “Egyptian Shumba” is so bizarre that it’s almost a parody. The first squeaks at the beginning of the song sound like some Austin Powers thing, but nope, it’s a legit, amazing girl-group song, replete with screams and sighs. Handclaps must not have been invented yet by 1963, because this is such a perfect song that if rhythmic handclaps had existed, they would have been all over this song.

I first heard this song on Girls Go Zonk!, a nice one-disc compilation, but you can also get a whole CD of just The Tammys, called Egyptian Shumba: The Singles and Rare Recordings 1962-1964. The best idea, though, is to invest in the mondo box set One Kiss Can Lead to Another. It’s packed with about 75,890,279,852 amazing, unknown girl-group songs, from favorites like the Shirelles and Petula Clark and unknowns, as well.

This has nothing to do with “Egyptian Shumba,” but I may be posting less often here. I’m about to leave for a year in India, studying Urdu in the northern city of Lucknow. I’ll have an Internet connection, so I’ll try to continue to post songs. I might also start writing about my travels, here or somewhere else. We’ll see.

The Tammys – Egyptian Shumba

If you’ve heard of Cab Calloway, you probably know his hit, “Minnie the Moocher.” You might not know, though, that there’s a terrific and bizarre cartoon of it, starring, incongruously, Betty Boop. Before I saw the video, I’d always assumed that Betty Boop was just a boring, ditzy character. Maybe she got stupid later on, but the awkwardly drawn girl in this cartoon is as far from bland as she is from conventionally erotic. Also, who knew Betty Boop was Jewish?

The actual story of this cartoon has little to do with what makes it worth watching. Betty Boop and her doggy friend Bimbo run away from home, and then the insanity begins. Their host to psychedelia is Cab Calloway, the walrus: he’s rotoscoped over the earliest known footage of Cab Calloway. Calloway, it seems, was a dance phenom, as well as the inventor of David Byrne’s big suit and the best-dressed man before Andre 3000. There’s a wonderful variety-show movie from 1943 called Stormy Weather that features some great dancing and singing from Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson (a.k.a. Mr. Bojangles), and a whole lot of other greats; it’s well worth checking out. You can download other Boop/Calloway collaboration, or get them on DVD. “Snow White” is especially strange and wonderful.

Whoops, it seems I forgot to post this one when I wrote it almost 2 weeks ago. Sorry for the delay!

One of my favorite new bands of 2004 was the Ditty Bops, who are an adorable duo from my hometown, Los Angeles. My friend Rachel and I went to go see them at Slim’s, in San Francisco, last Saturday, in the midst of a weekend of art pileup – previously that day, I’d seen the superb 1983 PBS graffiti documentary Style Wars, then Nick Cave’s disappointing new Australian Western The Proposition for $3 at Oakland’s fabulous Parkway theater. After the Ditty Bops show, I met friends at the Cat Club for Club Gossip, the monthly 80s video dancefest. Aside from fishing around in a trash can for pieces of my broken glasses, the highlight was probably going to the 24-hour King Diner for chili cheese fries before running to barely make it onto the 3:20 BART train (open late for construction). The next day was calmer; the only major media stimulation was the Al Gore movie, which was fairly good despite the heavy layers of self-promotion. For a superb, and much shorter, movie about Al Gore, check out the sometimes frustrating and often excellent Wholphin DVD that came with the 18th issue of the usually frustrating and rarely excellent McSweeney’s.

OK, maybe I just wanted to talk about all the movies I saw last weekend. That’s not counting the tremendously boring, emotionally unengaging, but very beautifully shot The Weeping Meadow, which I saw on the premise that a three-hour Greek movie about decades in the life of a family would be as good as The Best of Youth, the amazingly great six-hour Italian epic about forty years of an Italian family. It’s also not counting the other movie I saw earlier in the week, Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (Don’t Cry About Salim the Cripple), which is a moving 1989 Hindi film (although not really Bollywood, since it was short, realistic and had no songs) about how it sucks to be Muslim, sucks to be a gangster, and really sucks to be a small-time Muslim gangster in Bombay.

You can tell that I like movies. I also really like old jazz, and I think it’s a shame that it largely only remains on record and in the performances of earnest bands who play at county fairs and folk-music clubs. The Ditty Bops are a lovely exception. They have the veneer of an indie rock band, and their fans are the same people you’d see in the crowd of one of the friendlier indie bands, like the Decemberists. But when you look at it, they actually turn out to be more of a ragtime and early jazz band. One of their best songs is even a cover of the Fats Waller song “Sister Kate,” and they played a catchy Boswell Sisters cover, too. Their own songs are much in the same idiom, although of course they aren’t just mindless imitators, mooching the glories of past virtuosi. “Wishful Thinking” is my favorite of their endearing original songs, and comes from their self-titled first album, which I prefer to the new one. Just to spice it up a little, this is a bootleg from a 2004 show in LA, a few days before I saw them at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco. If you’re in the US and east of California, you’ve got pretty good odds of being able to catch their delightful live show; since they’re biking across the country, it’s going to take them a while to work their way over to New York.

The Ditty Bops – Wishful Thinking

I just moved over all the old posts from this blog’s former incarnation. The format has changed a little bit, but it’s still the same idea: good music, and who cares where it’s from?

I originally picked up Ramsay Midwood’s Shoot Out at the OK Chinese Restaurant just because I thought the title was funny. He looks like a young dude, but his voice has a lovely old-man muddledness. I’m pretty sure his whole act is a put-on, like Creedence, but it’s not really important. “Esther” is a beautiful, slow ballad; almost a lullaby.

Ramsay Midwood – Esther

I can’t stand Jay-Z, so there aren’t any songs along with this, but I wanted to post the fruits of my afternoon with Photoshop.

King Louie and the Swinging Monkeys – Loneliness

My friend Hallie is from Houston, and these are some kids she went to high school with. Most of their songs are good-natured love letters to drugs and that sort of thing, and fine, as far as they go. But this one’s the best, with a fantastic, murky sound and sleepy vocals, plus a groove that does the dancing for you, although it obviously wants you to help. Their web page and the guy in the picture’s Marley shirt say that they’re a reggae band, but they’re really not at all. The page is pretty 1997-core, and it doesn’t look like it’s been updated too much recently, but there’s some MP3s you can download. I don’t really know that much about King Louie, but I think maybe some of the members go to USC now. I want them to make a real CD, but I’m not standing on one foot or anything waiting for it.

Hasil Adkins – No More Hot Dogs

There are a lot of good things about this song. The words, about how he’s going to cut your head off at half past eight, and then you won’t be able to eat any more hot dogs, are funny, and it’s impossible to take their misogynism and aggression seriously. The tune’s catchy enough, and the puttering, murky guitar is nice to listen to. But the whole point is the crazed laughter at the beginning. It’s amazing.

Hasil Adkins was a rockabilly, or really a psychobilly, in the ’50s, back when electric guitars was a threat; he just took that threat farther than other people. I don’t know if anyone knew how to handle him then, but they forgot him, anyway, until Norton Records rediscovered him a while ago. Turns out he’s still around, still wacky, and still obsessed with chicken.

This song comes from Out to Hunch. If you listen to vinyl, look for a 45 whose A side is called “Sally Wally Woody Waddy Weedy Wally.” It’s about 5 times as good as this song – just loony. Seems Sally was one of his numerous ladies, aside from his current girlfriend, whose name is Hazel, if you believe him.

UPDATE:
Hasil died on April 25. RIP.

Barbara Manning – Blood of Feeling
The 6ths – San Diego Zoo (featuring Barbara Manning)

Barbara Manning is cute, in an aunt-like way, and quiet, but she’s got brains and grit under her extremely red hair. Doing covers of a Tom Lehrer song (”The Irish Ballad,” renamed “Rickety-Tickety-Tin”) and of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” one of my favorite Beatles songs, helps endear her to me, too, more than just any singer-songwriter shmoe. “Blood of Feeling” comes from her excellent album 1212, which has a fun song cycle about fire, from the points of view of everyone involved, including the arsonist and the match. There’s another good version on Under One Roof, a pretty solid singles collection, too. She’s got a lot of albums, with a whole bunch of bands, with weird track overlaps, and a lot of her stuff is out of print, but it’s not too hard to find in used bins, and it’s all pretty good. She also collaborates a lot with other bands. “San Diego Zoo” is one of those songs, from the 6ths, one of Stephin Merritt’s millions of side projects when he’s not writing another thousand songs for the Magnetic Fields. Aside from this song, Wasps’ Nests has a couple others that are pretty good, but most of the album’s value is the title, whose whole point is that it’s unpronounceable. The other 6ths album, Hyacinths and Thistles, is barely easier to say. That Stephin Merritt. What a joker. For some reason, Barbara’s really popular in Germany, and plays there all the time, but she’s from Chico, CA, and plays in California sometimes. I saw her play a lovely show, too short, at the Mile High Club in Oakland a few months ago. The extra bonus at that club is that they have tater tots, which go pretty well with a Fat Tire.