ART NOTES - to mark the 2009 Winter Special Olympics to be held in Idaho in February: the Boise Art Museum is hosting a photography exhibit entitled "Let Me Be Brave" through March 1st.
IF YOU'RE NOT TIRED YET of reading about our new president: the Observer's Paul Harris - an Englishman with part American ancestry - describes Barack Obama as having "the charm of Reagan and the ruthlessness of Roosevelt".
ALTHOUGH IT BEGAN decades ago by publishing only 8 issues/year: the news that MAD Magazine will be switching from monthly to quarterly publishing (after issue #500 in April) is still the end of an era. Keeping in stride, the current editor notes that readers say "only every third issue of MAD is funny, so we've decided to just publish those."
OLDER-YOUNGER ROCK STAR BROTHERS? - Rush bassist Geddy Lee and Nine Inch Nails bandleader Trent Reznor.
 
WHILE NOT THE FIRST PUBLICATION to look disparagingly on the merits of job re-training programs - author Louis Uchitelle did this in a 2007 book - the Ontario, Canada "Workplace Safety and Insurance Board" (WSIB) is supposed to train injured workers to re-enter the workplace and restore their pre-injury wage.
Instead, an investigative report by the Toronto Star finds that the program pays more to retrain injured workers to stock shelves than it would to send them to a four-year university.
THE DECISION to close its art museum and sell its $350 million art collection by Brandeis University - as the result of its endowment having shrank generally (plus with help from Mr. Madoff) - has caused quite a stir in Massachusetts.
ART NOTES - besides his famous political cartoons: some sketches and even sculptures by Tom Oliphant (chronicling the Bush years) are at the University of Virginia Art Museum in Charlottesville through March 8th.
ATTENTION PEACH STATE KITTEH LOVERS - a new Georgia license plate - available for an extra $25 - feature a painting of Hope the Cat (adopted from a shelter) with a portion of the revenue going to Georgia's Dog and Cat Sterilization Program which subsidizes spay/neuter procedures by veterinarians.
TRANSPORTATION NOTES - bus drivers in Colombia have long treated timetables as "more as a broad recommendation than as hard and fast rules". But now a consortium of German companies have been contracted to import their historic punctuality to a region noted for its relaxed way of life.
DIRECT DESCENDANTS? - Film star Patrick Stewart and advertising icon Mr. Clean.
 
IN a LENGTHY PROFILE yet fascinating profile of Barney Frank in the "New Yorker", Jeff Toobin notes that Barney was sent to the principal's office on his first day of high school (for talking too much) in Bayonne, New Jersey. "When I got to her office, my classmate Chuck was already there. He'd gotten into a fight with the toughest kid in the school." That was Chuck "The Bayonne Bleeder" Wepner, who in 1975 went fifteen rounds in a heavyweight championship bout against Muhammad Ali.
THE UNITED STATES EDITOR for the Guardian newspaper Mike Tomasky noted that "since the 1930s, Americans had been asked to pay higher taxes, submit to greater regulation and so on. But for three or four decades most felt it was worth the trade-off. These middle-class people (mostly white) were getting something out of it: an enviable standard of living, and a fundamentally stable society. By the 1970s, they were getting stagnant wages, high crime and myriad other maladies" which led to the conservative tide. But Tomasky argues that - now that the conservative movement has crash-landed - that liberalism has the chance to re-make itself for the present day.
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is Ernie the Earless Cat - a Michigan stray kitty now hard-at-work guarding a Kalamazoo boutique's cash register.
FIRST IT WAS the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whom scientists wanted to exhume (to see if he had been poisoned).
Now it is the body of the Italian astronomer Galileo that researchers want to exhume to determine if his severe vision problems may have affected some of his findings.
DEBAUCHERY CENTRAL - two university professors in Great Britain (David Evans and Kate Griffiths) have a series of essays called "Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture" that should appeal to the literary set.
YUK for today - from the Unlikely Products file: the son and daughter were tired of just licensing their late film actor father's image on products, and wanted to create something as well.
So, imagine John Wayne ORGANIC Beef Jerky if you will.
ART NOTES - opening this Friday is the exhibit American Artists Contemplate Asia at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City through April 19th, 2009.
NOT LETTING ANYTHING as insignificant as a stroke affect her: Kristy Grant attributed it to stress she's experienced wrangling with Volusia County, Florida over a cat sanctuary she operates on her 10 acres.
NEXT WEEK marks the 50th anniversary of The Day the Music Died as Don McLean chronicled it .....
... and events are being held in many places - most notably the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa where the plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper occurred.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame will designate the Surf as a landmark to commemorate the final concert in which they performed.
SEPARATED at BIRTH - Michael Keaton as "Beetlejuice" and the late Heath Ledger as "The Joker".
 
....... and for a song of the day....................................................................... looking at "is it or isn't it?" controversial songs from the 1960's: perhaps the most famous was written by R&B singer Richard Berry (photo left) who's remembered mostly due to a twist of fate - yet whose short career had more to it.
He was born in Extension, Louisiana in 1935, his family moving to Los Angeles in his infancy. He sang in various doo-wop bands, including The Flairs on a song that was produced by Jerry Lieber & Mike Stoller (both age 75 today). And they liked Berry's voice so much: when they produced a single by The Robins (later to become The Coasters) they had Berry sing the lead on their 1954 hit Riot In Cell Block #9 that had to be uncredited (as Berry was under contract to another label). Berry had another uncredited role on a duet with Etta James on her hit "Roll With Me, Henry".
Berry then led his own band The Pharaohs before tiring of the music business at age 22. He wanted to get married but needed some cash - and so he sold the rights to five songs for a total of $750.00. One of those five songs came about two years earlier when he was waiting to perform a side gig in Anaheim with a Latin band named the Rhythm Rockers. As he told journalist Bob Greene, the 12-piece band played a three-chord instrumental (while he was in the dressing room getting ready) that appealed to him. Lacking paper, he wrote some lyrics on a piece of toilet paper.
And thus was born the song Louie Louie that was eight years away from stardom.
Berry told Greene the tune was a love song structured like One for My Baby (And One More for the Road) was: when the singer said "Set-'em-up, Joe" it was clear that Joe was the star, but the singer was not Joe. In his tune, Berry said that the singer was a sailor who was speaking to Louie - who could be a barber, a bartender or any one else. Berry recorded the song on Flip Records (in a calypso/doo-wop smooth style), selling modestly on the West Coast but not the big break he had hoped for, helping persuade him to leave the music business. But a few copies made it to the Pacific Northwest (in part because The Pharoahs had performed there).
In 1963 a rock band in Portland, Oregon named The Kingsmen (photo right) heard the song and recorded it. And due to one factor - that they recorded it in a $50 studio with a ceiling mike - lead singer Jack Ely's vocals couldn't be heard clearly (especially over The Kingsmen's raggedy-funky volume) that meant the lyrics couldn't be understood ... and thus began the rumors that something ... well, illicit was going on. Bob Greene said that he wrote the 1988 article because he got a letter from a woman whose son's social studies class had debated the issue to no avail (Greene asserting that George Will probably didn't get letters like this). It was investigated by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, headed towards the top of the charts (before being halted by some radio stations banning the song) and made The Kingsmen stars.
Berry said he had "no positive or negative feelings either way" and he'd sold the rights to it, anyway. But he listened and determined that The Kingsmen sang "the same words exactly as I wrote them". The song had a new lease on life fifteen years later in 1978 when John Belushi sang it in the "Animal House" film. Berry finally met Kingsmen singer Jack Ely in 1983, who explained the studio set-up to him.
With some legal help in the mid-80's, Berry won back some of the rights to the song, enabling him to retire far from wealthy but comfortably. More than 400 versions have been recorded of the song, and Berry explained that it wasn't surprising that young musicians told him it was the first song they had ever learned: "it had three simple guitar-chord changes in it". Richard Berry died in January, 1997 at the age of 62.
 
And those lyrics? Well, the song made #55 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs list ... with the fairly innocuous lyrics below.
At this link you can hear a young Richard Berry sing it in 1956 ....
... and at this link you can hear The Kingsmen's 1963 version.
Fine little girl, she waits for me
Me catch a ship across the sea
Me sail the ship all alone
Me never think me make it home
Three nights and days me sail the sea
Me think of girl constantly
On the ship I dream she there
I smell the rose in her hair
Me see Jamaica moon above
It won't be long, me see me love
I take her in my arms and then
Me tell her I never leave her again
Louie, Louie - me gotta go
Louie, Louie - me gotta go
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