While Sitting Here Minding My Own Business ...

someone is always emailing me, or writing something that causes me to dash off to dusty corners of the interwebs and look stuff up. Sometimes it's Stoaty Weasel, who is always "making" me buy books - like when she writes about stuff like The Great Boston Molasses Flood (excellent book on that here). And sometimes it's one of my siblings, who are nearly as weird as me.

In this case, a simple discussion between little sis & me about whether (1) we should catch a show by guitarist Laurence Juber and (2) at which venue (he'll be at 2 fairly local spots this coming May). Now, I'm the family no-talent, but with 3 sibs that are musical, we talk about this stuff a lot. To enlighten me, she sends me this video of Paul McCartney & Wings, with Juber as a side man (he's the one that's neither McCartney nor Denny Laine, if that's any help. I have no more-technical description to give - I are dense). I find the video exceedingly cute - especially Macca (as the British tabloids call him), who's just as handsome as his early Beatle years, 15+ years prior.



So, after I've survived the excruciatingly slow "download over dialup" and played it 1 or 2 (or 8 or 10) times (complete with samba-ing around the joint in my jammies), it occurs to me that McCartney (actually, the whole crew) looks just like the illustrations of Jazz Age illustrator John Held, Jr. Whose work I've always loved, but it occurs to me that I've never searched him out in the ether. So ... she's off! (but you knew that)

Some Held pix:









More Held info here and here.

That second link is where I found the map woodcut (which I'd never seen before) - the author of the article calls it a "denunciation of notable places and things. 'Americana', for example, is a denunciation of all of the stereotypical symbols of American culture."

I dunno. For somebody who (in this case) is allegedly depicting a distaste for "rum runners" and "bootleggers," he certainly made a tidy profit off the alcohol-fueled antics of the Jazz Age American sheiks and flappers - and made their behavior look darned attractive, overall. I hate it when I find something in my internet sifting that queers my liking of someone/something I previously held in good regard. I think I shall just take the words embedded in the western states at face value:

"If You Don't Like This Country Go Back Where You Came From"

Or, if you started out here, pick some spot you find more beguiling. Cuba, anyone? Iran?

So there.