Sticking point

The (Philadelphia) North American, June 3, 1841. Great use of italics.

Harry Potter and the Coroner’s Slab

Duluth News Times, December 23, 1902. This cautionary tale brought to you as my contribution to National Headache Awareness Month, even though the latter strikes me as one of the most superfluous Awareness Weeks on the National Awareness Calendar. I mean, does anybody out there truly suffer from a headache awareness deficit? Read more.

Get your game face on

Omaha Morning World Herald, September 7, 1895. Sounds like lonely sport.

Two funerals and no wedding

New York Times, May 20, 1908. I don’t recall Yahweh signaling His opposition to May-December matches in Scripture, but in this instance He ostensibly sided with George Sterry Jr. against Sterry Sr.’s desire to take a second, younger bride.

Crowd pleaser

Philadelphia Inquirer, November 26, 1895. I like the notion of a “surfeit of suicides.” It’s the opposite of a suicide shortage, I suppose. How do we know when we’re looking at a suicide sufficiency?
Anyway, as performer, this Wunner fellow strikes me as the art brut/outsider version of a more conceptually sophisticated chap we met last fall. I should have thought people would have seen what was coming next, given the prevalence of razor-based suicide at this time. Though maybe they did and approved: It doesn’t seem to have been a terribly refined audience. Nearly cutting your own head off is no mean feat. I tried to find some stats on suicide by razor, but all I found was this medical journal abstract: “Suicide by incising one’s own throat without hesitation marks remains a rare, and only few cases have been reported in the forensic literature.” Seems to be a word missing after “rare,” but what? “Treat?” I’m thinking office Curry may have been a tad bipolar.

Seven Skeletons Found In The Yard

Recently I finished reading a very interesting history of American popular music, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music by Elijah Wald. Both the title and the subtitle are sort of misleading, though in ways that are more amusing than off-putting once you’ve read the book. The Beatles don’t even show up until the last 20 pages, and what comes before that is actually a rigorously non-alternative history of popular music. By that I mean that the guy is interested in the dialectics of the stuff that was actually popular in its time as a opposed to what we venerate as cool now. 90% of such music has been dismissed as beneath notice if not contempt by the sort of people who write histories of popular music. Wald isn’t championing this stuff aesthetically, just proving its cultural significance while demonstrating the total bankruptcy of writing music history as a genealogy of one’s own superior taste.

It’s just a really smart book: The macro-arguments are persuasive, and the micro-details are fascinating. Among the many things I’ve learned as a consequence of reading it is that old Trinidadian calypso music is really fucking weird and bears virtually no resemblance to the pop music marketed under that name in the U.S. in the 1950s. (Notice how I didn’t say “real calypso music”?)

Take this awesome track by early calypso star Lord Executioner: It’s like the Hope Chest set to a Betty Boop cartoon score as interpreted by moonlighting brass players from the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Lately if I’m not singing this, it’s because I’m listening to it.

Haven’t been able to find out a damned thing about Lord Executioner except that the young Louis Farrakhan was apparently a big fan. (Did y’all know that Farrakhan started out as an entertainer, name of Calypso Gene, aka “The Charmer”? I did not, although I did know about the calypso backgrounds of such luminaries as Robert Mitchum and Maya Angelou. I wonder if the three of them ever jammed together?)

Anyway: here’s the song, plus the lyrics as best as I could make them out. If anyone can help with those blank spots in the last verse, I’d be grateful. Take it away, your Lordship!

Hideous discoveries and monstrous crime
Always happen at the Christmas time
Hideous discoveries and monstrous crime
Always happen at the Christmas time
For the old year murders and the tragedy
For the New Year serious calamity
What shocked Trinidad
Those seven skeletons that the workmen found in that yard

What marred the Christmas festivity
Was a New Year double catastrophe
When a man and a woman on the ground was found
With bloodstains upon the ground
The husband was arrested but they were too late
For the poison he drunk sent him to the gate
That shocked Trinidad
Those seven skeletons that the workmen found in that yard

In Saint James the population went wild
When in the savannah they found a child
The hair was auburn and complexion pink
Which placed the watchman in a mood to think
“How can a mother despise and scorn
A little angel that she has born?”
That was more sad
Than the seven skeletons that the workmen found in that yard

A lorry was speeding to Port of Spain
When it knocked down the cyclist into the drain
It was going as fast as the lightning flash
When the cyclist received the lash
The mother cried out in sorrows and pain
I am not going to see my boy-child again
That is more sad
Than the seven skeletons that the workmen found in that yard

While the workmen they were digging the ground
They [ ? ] all human beings they found
Feet together and head east and west
Number five was a watchman among the rest
Number six had the hands and the feet on the chest
And number seven [something "serious guest"?]
That shocked Trinidad
Those seven skeletons that the workmen found in that yard

Oh, and I really, really love that this is a Christmas song. I’ve long favored a comprehensive turnover of the Christmas musical canon (backed by force of law), and this gets my vote as the replacement for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

He took a powder

Forgot to cross-post this one. Pretty astounding.

Train kept a’rollin

Philadelphia Inquirer, January 1, 1913. Some of these deaths leave me wondering if we’re not looking at a disguised suicide.

Cross post

I forgot to publicize this one over at the Reader.

Sharp, flattened

Salt Lake Telegram, April 17, 1922. A closed-casket funeral I’m guessing.