Two Things...

...which are, so far as I can tell, unrelated.

1) I've been listening to Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 a lot recently. He's fab. I grew up listening to him, you know. When other people were poisoning themselves with New Kids on the Block, Paula Abdul or Snow (ahh, the early '90s, when pop music rolled over and died), I was listening to LPs swiped from my mother's music collection. Sergio featured heavily: she had (and now I have) Ye-Me-Li, Crystal Illusions, and Fool on a Hill. It's bedrock cool: original yet influenced, hot but cool, mellow but intense. Of its time, as it were, but for all ages. Go get you some. I hear he cut a track not long ago, a re-mix of Mas Que Nada with the Black Eyed Peas.

[It's odd, but my mother's music collection for a period is pretty damn cool: Sergio, Fifth Dimension, Jim Croce. It soon sort of fades into mid 70s Streisand and Neil Diamond, and from there into really awful early 80s country and from there into Jesus music. I cannot imagine my mother as someone Into Music, like an Indie kid, for whom music is important, talking about music to other people and really being affected by it, and loyal to a sound, but I had to get it from somewhere. And there was always music in out house. Good music, be it Bach or Bacharach, so maybe she was.]

2) So did you know Tennessee Williams' first published work was in Weird Tales? Yeah, it was: "The Vengeance of Nitocris", (1928). Very clearly of the sub-Lovecraft genre, it's exactly as bad as you'd think. But it's also the lodestone of everything he ever wrote: brother/sister weirdness, revenge, canny women, pretty boys, untrustworthy narrators, death...