Mar 31, 2005

Goodbye, Raffi

John has mercifully taken out the Raffi CD we've been listening to in the van for the past few years. He replaced it with Honest Bob and the The Factory-to-Dealer Incentives. This is the best way to get me to listen to new music. Jack and I both really dig "Dinner with Laurie," where a guy runs into Laurie Anderson at the supermarket. It's sung/spoken in the inimical Laurie Anderson style. Jack asks to have it played over and over again. He has the refrain memorized.

And she said ooh, it isn't very hard
The cellar's in the attic and the attic's in the yard
And she said ooh, try it now and see
The ocean's in the kitchen and the kitchen's on TV.

They also have a song in which the lyrics are taken from this website by a "Dr. Gene Ray." You have to stop to admire the guy's tenacity, verbosity, tortured syntax, and liberal use of underlining. Not to mention the consistently fevered pitch of his rhetoric and the almost total lack of explanation. His site is very popular, and you can understand why. "Dr. Gene Ray" doesn't have any terrorist or counter-terrorist agenda, or any particular leanings even toward Republican or Democrat, and he doesn't ask for money, as far as I can see. He only asks that you believe, but believe what, exactly? Dr. Ray's got a case of good old-fashioned crazy going on. It's refreshing.

That said, it's possible that "Gene Ray" is actually Laurie Anderson taking performance art online. Or maybe David Byrne? He's done a bunch of weird stuff with PowerPoint. Whoever you are, Dr. Ray, great site. Keep the faith.

2 comments:

Scrivener said...

Well, according to Dr. Ray's site, he'll be lecturing at my institution in a couple of weeks. I might be willing to go and find out if Dr. Ray and Laurie Anderson are in fact one and the same, but there's no information about exactly when and where. I could send an email to the address listed, but not sure I want to open myself up to the kind of mailings that might follow.

Scrivener said...

It's true, Dr. Ray was at Tech on Thursday, and a number of my students went. They told me that he was quite amusing at first, but then he veered off into some kind of scary diatribe about race, and no one was so sure anymore that it was still funny. He evidently has a pretty deep delusional system in place.