Category: Blog

When I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac, it never occurred to me that Slim Gaillard might be a real person. A dip into the archives was a revelation. He played the guitar and tap danced, sang duets with Dizzy Gillespie, spoke eight languages, and even invented his own language. His comic performances were a unique brand of nonsense jive talk — a variation on hipster slang and nonsense words known as Vout. Gaillard’s words are weird, yet curiously logical, and superbly rhythmic. In “Flat Foot Floogie” he sings: “Flaginzy at flagat, flaginzy ooh flagoo-jigee.” And you can hear the chuckles coming through it all. Spoken and sung slightly off-kilter, it kept me listening, kept me guessing, kept me wanting to hear more. Rap singers could learn a lot from Slim Gaillard. If you listen to him on YouTube

The world loves to mock the old fool in his last gasp, who runs off with a young floozy, so this tale is pretty much a classic laugh. Yeah, whatever age men are, they tend to believe they are still young cockerels and up for the hump if a young chicken comes on to them. You could gob-smack me with a hundred reasons why an old guy might dump his wife for a younger model. But few men would be quite so foolish as my husband Arthur, who, after a four-day sex orgy with a Colombian gold-digging groupie, dumped his ever-loving, clever wife. Yeah, I prefer to think about myself as the ever-loving, clever wife—it makes me feel less humiliated. I had been walking along the beach of destiny with Arthur, the love of my life, when in truth I

I suppose most French people remember Jean-Francoise Bizot the owner of the underground newspaper Actuel. Bizot claimed Paris riots and the student protests of May 1968 so electrified him he quit his job at L’Express and decided to launch the counter-culture monthly magazine Actuel. It soon became required reading for the French elite. Actuel was like the independent newspaper of the time typically hippie commune-like in the vein of Village Voice, Los Angeles Free Press, Oz, and London’s IT. In spite of its Underground orientation, it had a widespread influence on French cultural life and was considered by some to be their intellectual bible. Actuel gave voice to ecologists, feminists, gay-rights activists, squatters, but it also included the arts and poetry, writing on existentialism, surrealism, articles about Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, and Soft Machine. Well actually anything new, which meant