Heavy Rotation : : Two Songs for Spring

I just discovered the Great White Jenkins (myspace), a band in Richmond, VA. To me they're somewhere in the Heartless Bastard and Arcade Fire zone.

First song: (Cast Your Shit to the) Wind

Second song, though this is more the blackberry winter part of spring: O Night

The two songs are sort of indie power ballads. "Wind" is from Mussel Soals; "O Night" is from Where is They Sting?, which is available on iTunes.

Thanks to Aquarium Drunkard for the introduction.

Heavy Rotation : : Waits Dishes the Dali Lama + Ohio Players

"That's not the Holiness I used to know . . . You know what I'm saying? He had a whole 'nother look going." Tom Waits sings "Diamond in Your Mind" for the Dali Lama. Buy it at iTunes or eMusic.

What does Ohio sound like? Maybe it's Erika Wennerstrom singing "Into the Open." Listen for free at Fat Possum. Buy it at iTunes or eMusic.

Heavy Rotation : : ABC Was Doing Mashups Before Mashups Were Cool

Janis Joplin and Tom Jones in 1969, from Tom Jones's variety show on ABC. Buy the DVD. Hat tip: VSL.

Heavy Rotation : : James Brown, 1933-2006

As best I can remember, the first time I saw/heard James Brown was in Ski Party, a 1965 Frankie Avalon vehicle. I was 8.

Heavy Rotation : : Sentence of the Week

Tom Ford in the November W: "My butt is naturally hairless, by the way."

Said appropos of the issue's centerfold, which shows a naked Tom Ford cavorting with two clothed ladies in the sack. The boys at Style.com have chosen not to post that picture, or the others from the over-the-top Ford fashion spread, staring the designer in each and every photo. But some kind citizen in the East has come to our rescue. The centerforld is here; the other photos start here.

Heavy Rotation : : Mary's Barbecue

Of the three places that were my barbecue rotation when I was in college in Nashville, only Mary's Old Fashioned Pit Bar-B-Cue is still open.

Jimmy Coursey's was out by the racetrack/fairgrounds/rollercoaster. The place had two plain rooms, good pork and if, on occasion, you showed up in groomsman attire with a covey of bridesmaids and wedding guests, and a number of bottles of champagne that the groom's little sister had swiped from the reception and cached in your daddy's big-ass maroon Lincoln, no one really objected. Jimmy Coursey's was always third on my list of barbecue places, but it was a fond number three.

Charlie Nickens was just west of downtown, close to the river, in an industrial/warehouse district. I'm sure the neighborhood had seen better days, or at least more populous ones. Nickens proudly soldiered on. I always had pulled pork sandwiched between two cornbread pancakes with slaw and, probably, beans, but I don't remember beans. If I had desert it was lemon ice-box pie. As good as the food was the promise offered on the restaurant's large sign out front, which contained a Holiday-Inn style section for changing messages. Beneath the elaborately styled Charlie Nickens logo came the sentence in small plain letters: "We never close." For my four years in Nashville, the letters never changed.

Mary's is not far from where Nickens was, up Jefferson Street a few blocks past the farmer's market. Mary's serves all the standard barbecues: pulled pork, ribs and chicken. Here I almost always got the white-meat chicken sandwich with extra hot sauce. The counter man or woman would dunk a cooked chicken breast — bone still in — in a vat of sauce, then place it still dripping between two pieces of white bread, wrap it up in paper and seal it with a toothpick.

For a long time Mary's was strictly drive-in. You could eat standing in the parking lot or take your food elsewhere. Mary's has a dining room now, two freshly sheetrocked and tiled rooms with plastic booths, tables and chairs that somehow feel new and abandoned at the same time. Customers stream in steadily and line up to place their orders, then mostly take their food away, as before. The barbecue is still good, but last weekend I passed on the chicken sandwich and instead had a pulled pork sandwich, which Mary's now serves a la Nickens, between two cornbread pancakes. Maybe they always did and I just didn't notice. The cornbread was good but sweeter than I like.

Heavy Rotation : : Isn't Blogging Another Way Not to Get Rich?

You'd think a guy who's written books about rodents, New Jersey swampland and Native American fishing rituals wouldn't have to be so obvious as to write a book called How Not to Get Rich. Still, it's nice to read a how-to book and be able to trust that the author really knows what he's talking about.

As good as Robert Sullivan's bona fides are for non-wealth formation, they might be improved if he were also a blogger. But he isn't. He insists on writing only for money. Which isn't exactly a how-to-get-rich strategy, but it lacks the unrich-zeness of writing for free.

Robert is a natural blogger. Or would be if he would only listen to me and sign up at Typepad already. (Trust me, I've tried.) Check out the opening of his chapter on "How to Spend the Bulk of Your Leisure Time If You Are Not Going to Get Rich, Probably Ever":

You read. You read for pleasure. Nor constantly; you want to see your friends and get outside once in a while and so on, but you want to do a lot of reading. Perhaps it sounds too simple, but reading is an important strategy in the pursuit of a lifestyle that is, monetarily speaking, not that well off.

See where I'm going with this? Just change read and reading to . . . :

You blog. You blog for pleasure. Nor constantly; you want to see your friends and get outside once in a while and so on, but you want to do a lot of blogging. Perhaps it sounds too simple, but blogging is an important strategy in the pursuit of a lifestyle that is, monetarily speaking, not that well off.

Doesn't that make perfect sense? I'm not arguing that Robert is a Web 2.0 guy (hell, he's not really even a Web 1.0 guy, though he did manage to install a wireless network in his new apartment). But he sure is a long-tail guy (please review book subjects, above), and he belongs on the web. I promise to keep trying.

Heavy Rotation : : Muy Fifí

Ersi Arvizu is "Muy Fifí" on Ry Cooder's latest CD, Chavez Ravine. I don't know why, but the song and the CD are not available on iTunes. You can hear a snippet here, and of course at Amazon. According to this review on Rootsworld, Cooder tracked down Arvizu, who had earlier sung with the groups The Sisters and El Chicano, in Arizona, where she was working as a Fedex driver.