2007 is the end

Let's see if I can get this right...do you all remember the band Ian MacKaye did between Minor Threat and Fugazi? Embrace. That's what we used to call Emo back then. I don't know what they're talking about when they say Emo now. I don't know what they're talking about when they say anything. Anyway, Embrace had a song and one of the lyrics goes: "It's the end of a fucked up year, there's another one coming...!" Right? Something like that. You feeling it? I'm feeling it. 2007 was, um, pretty lame. History will tell us if more amazing people died this year or were born this year. I'm betting the former. Whatever, forget the unfulfilled promises and the neverending wars and the increasing temperatures and it wasn't the worst year. In numerology 2007 is a number 9 year which is the end of the numerology scale. Things coming to an end, finishing, dying...if you made it through give yourself a kiss on the shoulder. Didn't you notice how hard it was to start things up this year? Looking forward to 2008 - a year of beginnings.

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Ukefink in the 70’s

We haven't got a letter in awhile until this one came in from S.M. in Fresno, CA who asks:

"Where was Ukefink when we needed you...back in the early Seventies?"

Well, it's nice to be needed but the early part of that decade Ukefink was busy gathering "experience". Hitchhiking through the west, riding the rails across the south, working for the carnival. We ended up down in Mexico on a film shoot with an alchemist named Alejandro Jodorowsky. You may have watched a bootleg VHS copy of his seminal work, The Holy Mountain, in your college days and thought some of those extras looked familiar...yes, Ukefink can be seen with a keen eye in many of the scenes. Our motives were experience but what it really brought us was a life-long connection to each other and a need to give back to the world what it had so generously given us. We often forget where we came from and it is good to be reminded S.M. and we appreciate your letter. Remember the smell of the flower.

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What other movies with Elliot Gould do you recommend?
Current mood: Apathetic

Dear Ukefink, I just watched the movie MASH and really think Elliot Gould is just amazing and it really made me want to see more of him. What other movies with Elliot Gould do you recommend? - Y.B. from Bend, OR
Elliot Gould...there is at least a double album worth of songs that could be written while watching him drag our emotions around like a sack of eggs though all his great films. Unforgettable he is in Altman's The Long Goodbye with his opening scene with his cat and his nonchalant cigarette lighting. And he almost makes us want to go to war if we can just taste his hooch in MASH. California Split is another one of our favorites. But to really feel Gould (get it?) Ukefink suggests a late night viewing of Little Murders. Watch alone or with someone you "love". When accused of being a pacifist for not fighting back (he gets beat up all the time) he corrects his fiancés father by saying, "Apathist." Oh, and he is a perfect apathist. The film is great all around with stellar monologues from Vincent Gardenia, Lou Jacobi, Alan Arkin (who also directs), and Donald Sutherland as an existentialist preacher. Written by Jules Feiffer it may be too heavy of a black comedy/satire for some of our more sensitive listeners/readers with its how-do-we-live-in-this-fucked-up-world-without-becoming-completely-numb-or-killing-someone-to-feel-something morals. But Y.B., we think you can handle it. Rarely has a movie about how hard it is to give a shit (note reference to Goulds characters profession here) been so funny. Check out this great quote: "It was after this that I began to wonder. If they're that unformidable, why bother to fight back? It's very dangerous. It's dangerous to challenge a system unless you're completely at peace with the thought that you're not going to miss it when it collapses." Or this: "Are you really so down on people, or are you just being fashionable?" Enjoy.

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I hear a lot of early Tony Iommi in Ukefink...which Black Sabbath record is Ukefink's favorite?

Thanks for all the cards and letters! Keep 'em coming!

This week's is from I.P. in Fayetteville, NC who writes:

I hear a lot of early Tony Iommi in Ukefink...which Black Sabbath record is Ukefink's favorite?

Glad you asked I.P. Ukefink has two favorite albums by the Sab. Black Sabbath (the first record) and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Firstly, these have the best album cover art of all their discs (Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules have pretty great covers but, c'mon, you can't really count them as Sabbath records when Dio is singing...okay discs though). The witch (open up the gatefold) on the first record is creepy and hours upon hours have spent in complete hynotism staring at it. This is the darkest of Sabbath's records and that means the heaviest. Slow, crawl-lick-centric, the gloom it brings is supernatural and scarey...like the best music. The three records that followed are classic Sabbath, dirty and skull crushing, and need to be blasting out of every car stereo in America if we are really to make a revolution but this first album is really personal and digs around in your corpse until it finds the last bit of your soul, yanks it out, and abuses it like a wad of play-dough. The reason we are in love withSabbath Bloody Sabbath is because it is a return to the creepy but in a different way. Sure the music is produced in cleaner way, more typical bluesy riffs going on, and downright weird (Who Are You? - Ozzy's compositon - is like music from a Dario Argento funhouse ride). The music has a depressed druggie influence that drags it around a broken down apocolyptic dragon themed rollercoaster. There seems to be some animosity between the members that gives the music a certain adrenaline. There is some hope on the record but you can tell The Sab haven't actually experienced it yet - still a dream. The cover kills with the before and after illustrations on the front and back. We actually believe in and fully endorse all the Black Sabbath up through Sabotage, after that things get iffy. (I hear Greg Ginn was really into Born Again later Sab but Ukefink never embrassed that stuff too much.) The Dio stuff is good driving around music too but won't start no revolutions - well, maybe the Mob Rules song. Thanks for the question I.P. - keep Looking For Today... - we leave you with this poem from the inside of the first record: "Still falls the rain, the veils of darkness shroud the blackened trees, which contorted by some unseen violence, shed their tired leaves, and bend their boughs towards a grey earth of severed bird wings. among the grasses, poppies bleed before a gesticulating death, and young rabbits, born dead in traps, stand motionless, as though guarding the silence that surrounds and threatens to engulf all those that would listen. Mute birds, tired of repeating yesterdays terrors, huddle together in the recesses of dark corners, heads turned from the dead, black swan that floats upturned in a small pool in the hollow. there emerges from this pool a faint sensual mist, that traces its way upwards to caress the chipped feet of the headless martyr's statue, whose only achievement was to die to soon, and who couldn't wait to lose. the cataract of darkness form fully, the long black night begins, yet still, by the lake a young girl waits, unseeing she believes herself unseen, she smiles, faintly at the distant tolling bell, and the still falling rain."

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