Obscure Today – Tarkus

The local River North restaurant Rockit uses former album covers as binders for their menus.  I was surprised one day to see Tarkus by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

While Tarkus would be an obscure album today (the average person who is familiar with classic rock might know “Lucky Man” and a couple other songs) it is hard to think that in 1971, when this album came out, it reached #1 on the billboard charts in the UK (and #9 in the US).  According to wikipedia, this album landed between “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones and “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel.

To put this in context – “Sticky Fingers” was one of the run of 4 fantastic albums that put the Rolling Stones in the pantheon of rock – they were 1) Beggars Banquet 2) Let it Bleed 3) Sticky Fingers 4) Exile on Main Street.  And everyone knows Bridge over Troubled Water.

And yet Tarkus, and mostly Emerson, Lake & Palmer, is completely and utterly unknown.  Nowadays Tarkus would be viewed as a niche product, un-commercial for radio / MP3 singles but perhaps capturing a tiny but devoted market.  The song Tarkus takes up a whole side, and is over 20 minutes long, a series of sub-songs linked into one big song.  If you even thought about releasing a jazz / semi-metal / progressive rock album (CD) like this today you’d get laughed out of the record executive’s office (if they have offices anymore).

At least I was entertained seeing Tarkus as part of my lunch menu.  To think that one day long ago that this would be more than a minor trivia item, or a piece of kind of ugly artwork, is almost unthinkable.

Cross posted at LITGM

“Do readers of liberal and conservative blogs live in two different countries?” (Part II)

I put up a post a couple of weeks ago about the BlogAds survey of blog readers.

Now there’s an updated graphic from BlogAds, based on data from the same survey, providing information about liberal/conservative blog readers’ positions on some questions that weren’t addressed in the initial survey report:

Survey of Blog Reader Attitudes, Part II

There certainly are some strong patterns here, not that this comes as a shock to anyone. (Of course my caveat about self-selected data samples applies to these results as it did to the initial results.)

(Chicago Boyz is a BlogAds affiliate.)

The Dying of the Light

I am not quite sure when I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels; it was sometime in my teens. The public library had several copies of Rider on a White Horse, which I thought immediately was the most perfectly evocative historical fiction ever, knocking such lesser lights like Gone With the Wind effortlessly into the shade. Besides, I was a Unionist and an abolitionist; and I thought Scarlett was a spoiled, self-centered brat and Melanie a spineless simpleton and I usually wanted to throw GWTW across the room so hard that it banged against the opposite wall when Margaret Mitchell began complaining about Northern abolitionists. Anyway, the only book that came close to Rider was Sutcliff’s adult Arthurian novel Sword at Sunset. This was the book that had me taking my poor younger brother and sister to every significant site of Rome in Britain, the summer that we spent there. Here and now I apologize here for dragging them to the remains of Galava Roman Fort, near Ambleside in the Lake District. In 1976 it was on the map, a clear and distinct quadrangle … but when we went to see it then, there was nothing but some shaped rocks edging a grassed-over stretch of ditch in a field full of cows. A thing of less interest could hardly be imagined … but I wanted to see it, anyway, being haunted by the sense that Sutcliff conveyed in Sword at Sunset and in books like Lantern Bearers that of men and women who were living at the end of things, among the half-crumbled ruins of a great and dying empire, wistfully seeing all the evidence around that things had been better, greater, grander once, and now they weren’t and wishing there was something that could be done to call those days back again.

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Quick Wisconsin Political Update

The contract over at InTrade is up to 86% for Walker as of this writing. As of the last week or so, the people on the Barrett side seem to have finally given up and are bailing furiously. Here is the chart.

The MSM is in a full court press to try to save Barrett but nothing seems to be working. The first three stories on our local “news” last night all bashed Walker in some form or another. It was ridiculous. They don’t even try to act impartial anymore.

Walker’s enormous war chest is crushing the Dems with wave after wave of mailers and TV ads. On top of this he will probably have $$ left over to spend for his candidates this fall. I have read that the national funding has dried up for the Dems. I think the unions are out of money. I don’t have any real proof of these things besides what I am hearing and seeing.

I don’t know how the state senate recall races will end up. I have a feeling the senate will be lost, but no big deal. Walker’s reforms are already through and are working. In addition, there is no legislative business until next year, and the R’s can perhaps peel back some of the D’s gains in the state senate (if there are any) this November.

There is more good news – super liberal congress critter Tammy Baldwin is behind ANY of the three Republicans currently running in polling for our vacant US Senate seat. That would be a pick up for the R’s as Dem Herb Kohl is (finally) retiring.

I don’t want to start celebrating yet, but the fat lady looks to be arriving at the opera hall pretty soon.

Disclosure – this blog is an InTrade affiliate.