Playing with your organ!

Two weeks ago after too much whiskey, I watched 5 minutes of a Lawrence Welk re-run, maybe it turned into 25 minutes I don't clearly remember. I was transfixed by the 'dated' 1960's organ sound, a Thomas Organ to be exact, a sound I can pick out whether I am coherent or not! I can not properly convey the level of ....um...campiness (well, that might be too harsh of a description) but if you are familiar with the organ and know the sounds it can produce then you know what I am talking about. (This was NOT a Hammond B-3)
Put that inane repeating drum sound on, add in an organ-marimba, cello, whatever, turn on the Vibra-Magic and you have a Lawrwence Welk show soundtrack. I can't play the piano or organ worth a damn, I tired; you can buy old organs rather cheap if you agree to haul them off (check it out). I bought an organ at an estate sale about 6 years ago for $ 10 and put it in my garage, I would occasionally play it at night much to the confusion of my neighbors...the garage allowed for even greater echo effects and it was like the Welk show was being piped in from the heavens! More on this later.......

Franklin Rosemont departs

Last week the Surrealist Movement and the world in general lost a dear friend, Franklin Rosemont. Franklin, co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group, facilitator of a more organized Surrealist Movement in the United States (in general terms) IWW activist, Arsenal founder, writer, champion of Ted Joans and Philip Lamantia, friend of the Beats; mentor and supporter of the Portland Surrealist Group and the Saint Louis Surrealist Group, etc, can NOT be summed up in a mere blogpost so I will let his words linger on like sweet wine on a hot sun-soaked day......... : "Surrealism strives to liberate the imagination from the strictures of repression, to restore our latent poetic faculties, to put language in the service of desire and to enable it to formulate ardent images of implacable subversion. There is no 'realistic' escape from the life which offers more than the surrealist seizure of life. Unveiled language does not propose an escape but rather a thoroughgoing transformation of the world."

"Starting from the very depths of what we call the imagination, pure psychic automatism brings to the surface signals of the individual's farthest vision into the self - signals which tend to take on aspects of the future. Surrealism, this invisible ray, was brought into being not only to discover these signals, but to realize the future they call forth. The automatic image becomes a guide to action." --- Franklin Rosemont, excerpts via Arsenal 1970

Jesus drives a Lincoln

Hell yes, Jesus drives a Lincoln, 1989 powder-blue to be exact, matching the old-lady-hair of the driver going 25 on the 40 mph road with a large chrome Jesus fish around the Lincoln nameplate on the trunk.

Welcome to Crazies, Kooks & Lawrence Welk

This blog will contain somewhat infrequent musings from me and maybe guest bloggers associated with art, poetry, alien visitation, time-travel, government conspiracies, historical mysteries, Tesla's last experiments, Lawrence Welk's organ (whoa), fringe movements deserving more attention and artistic endeavors out of the mainstream........