Fairy Tales & Other Murders by Mike Marino (readera ebook reader .TXT) 📕

and tux. Bernstein fully in charge of flutes and violins..it is a work of beauty...french horns...timpanis…piccolos...all coalesce in a colorful melange of surreal aural imagery. The symphony as such is classical beauty...Lauren Bacall….Ingrid Bergman….Katherine Hepburn...add tuba’s and you have Roseann Barr!

 

There are some symphonies written with the tuba cast as a leading man...more Sydney Greenstreet than Humphrey Bogart I grant you. Take Mahler’s Symphony #2... please! There are parts for rogue tuba insertions from Berlioz to Dvorak...bear in mind morphine was plentiful and available in their day. If they had known of lava lamps then you can imagine a performance by the Grateful Tuba Dead band circa 1703. How do you say Truckin’ in Austrian? Do Austrians truck at all or do they not even give a truck?

 

Beethoven wrote “Fur Elise” which includes a tuba solo. A tuba solo? Bear in mind he was deaf and inserting tuba solos was his way of striking back at the fickle finger of fate and make the audience suffer as well, and in fact wish they too were deaf!!!

 

The tuba is an example of pure dueling banjo southern inspired musical inbreeding….it’s genealogy can be traced back to 1590 with the creation of a curving puzzle of a monstrosity called “the serpent” which went through many changes and offspring including the Sousaphone...which came marching along with John Phillip Sousa as he gave it a martial march machismo that became….Military Music..bear in mind...Military Music is to music what Military Justice is to justice. “Stars and Stripes Forever” is tuba heavy. I can imagine the bugler waking us up in the army with a goddamned tuba instead of a bugle...he would have been fragged before breakfast!

 

Today there are tuba festivals in Canada (figures!) Ann Murray singing “Snow Bird” accompanied by a tuba with a Canuck accent. Gordon Lightfoot could sink the Edmund Fitz with one blast of a tuba!!

 

There is an international tuba competition held in Georgia every year. Great..dueling banjos...hell, I’d drop my Ned Beatty pants and squeal like a pig just to get them to stop!! Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Parade is almost here...be forewarned...many high school bands will march along the route with a massive display of tuba hardware..so much in fact it will resemble a Cold War Soviet Parade of armaments and missiles. All Kruschev needed was tubas in Cuba and we would have made a deal...Imagine a tuba aimed at Washington D.C. ...DEVASTATING. Tubas somehow had a little help from their friends and have even infected pop culture with it’s virus as one appears in one of it’s horn incarnations on the Sgt Pepper album just to the left of the centered drum. I remember when I first saw the album cover in the day stoned on acid...I thought it was a bong! WRONG...somebody spoke and I went into a dream…

 

Beware too...Hail to the Chief tuba solos every time he steps to a podium...it frightening for two reasons..one he’s a damned politician...and two he’s accompanied by Marine Tuba players….shouldn’t they be storming a beach somewhere instead...oh well….Sgt Pepper taught the Marine band to play for the benefit of Mr. Kite...who ran off with Lovely Rita and Lucy..and left his tuba next to a drum on an album cover….

 

 

Chapter 21 - Bag Pipes and Monica Lewinsky

I'll get to Monica Lewinsky in a minute...but first..Bagpipes are the Car Alarm of the music world. They seem to go off by accident and until the piper is piping hot it’s a cacophony of sound without a purpose, except to announce that manly men in kilts and fair lassies with short plaid skirts are about to appear in a nightmare on Riverdance Street! It is the Freddy Krueger of instruments. Aerophones to be exact played when one person takes the high road and one takes the low road and one gets to Scotland a’fore ye. I wish people still talked like that.

 

The inner workings of a bag of pipes uses reeds fed from a reservoir dog of air in the bag. The most common method of supplying air to the bag is through blowing into a blowpipe, or blow stick. In some pipes the player must cover the tip of the blowpipe with his tongue while inhaling, so that eliminates former President Bill Clinton. Remember he never inhaled...but Monica Lewisky was a virtuoso with his blowstick! In effect, the bagpipe is a terminal windbag patient relying on an intravenous feed of air to keep it alive until it expires!

Blame it all on the Irish and the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame U? Nope...bagpipes predate the civilizing of the Irish when the Celts hit the fan. They first appeared in places like Turkey, the Persian Gulf and North Africa.

 

Although most frequently used at funerals of the Donut Eating Minions but there has been an avalanche of folk music revivals and festivals not to mention flat out the influence of Michael Flately and the highland high stepping hijinx of his River Dance dancing Babes. Films….bagpipe overdose in Braveheart with Mel Gibson mixing it up with Celts in kilts.

 

Now, being of Canadian extraction me’sef I hate to admit that in Canada curling is king and the bagpipe is the OFFICIAL instrument of the World Curling Federation and played during the procession of teams before major curling championships. I mean it’s not like hockey where a good machchismo filled puck can penetrate your net.

 

Today bagpipes are proliferating like Tribbles in Captain Kirk’s bedroom and it may surprise you to know that the world’s largest producer of bagpipes is Pakistan!! No wonder we invaded them. Forget Bin Laden which translated from Arabic means, Bagpipe Gansta!

 

Hell, in this the E Age there is a new evil bag force called the Electronic Bagpipe developed in Austria...the same people who gave us Arnold Swarzennager and Adolph Hitler!

Remember the Sixties? Clear your fogged up brain and fear not. It got by us somehow but it began to insert itself like a junkies needle into rock and roll and is still here today used by musicians from Paul McCartney to AC/DC. Thankfully in my LSD dazed days I didn’t load up on Mr. Owsley’s acid at the Fillmore listening to White Rabbit or “Are You Experienced” on bagpipes. We did have bags of course, dime bags of weed, and hash pipes too but not the same..closest we had was a multi-stemmed hookah similar to a bag pipe without a bagpipe playing caterpillar doing a rendition of Piece of My Heart with Joplin doing a Wild Turkey Highland Fling. Thankfully there were no bagpipe solos at Woodstock by John Sebastian!!!

Chapter 22 - Kilts! Show Us Your Tartan Nessie!

Kilts, those mainly manly fashion garments of plaid and proud Scotsmen have been the butt of jokes (peculiar pun intended) and special  speculation about the mystery of what lies sleeping dormant and not so docile in the Lowlands below a lad’s beltline. Is that a Lock Ness Monster in your kilt or are you just happy to see  me?  Is it where Laddie keeps his Nessie nestled safely until it appears and raises it’s head erect to thrill the tourist so to speak?  Insinuating innuendos abound as well. Were you aware or not aware that many men and kilt wearing lassies wear no underwear?

 

The kilt can be traced back to its humble semi-erotic beginnings to the 16th Century when it was called a “great kilt” which was a full length affair with the top half doubled as a cloak over the shoulder and could also be used as a “hoodie” in the Highland Hood for protection in bad weather on the moors where the Baskerville Hounds howled in the dark dank night. The kilt as we know it today,  is referred to as the walking kilt that came into fashion around 1720 and is pretty much just the bottom half of a great kilt. The small kilt is called a “filibeg” and the little dangling bag, (not to be confused with what may lie under the kilt) is called a “sporran” or in effect...a man purse or man pouch. Now there’s a visual!

 

There are women’s kilts as well including mini kilts so ample thigh is visible and the treasure of her lowlands are yonder in the fields of musky heather. Interestingly enough, the femme kilt is made with a minimum of fabric with a narrower front apron to show off those treasured hips  as they swing and sway and sashay down the road from Eden to Edinburgh.

 

Tartans were tantamount to treachery and reasonable treason under British rule for centuries as they developed from an innocent indication of regional distinctions to the more sinister warrior class...revolution in plaid! Samurai’s in wool! So blame the Celts for kilts and Scottish cuisine especially cock-a-leekie (includes prunes for the prudes) which is obviously a boast to boost awareness of incontinence or merely to taking  pride in a Scotsman’s prowess with penile plentitude.

 

Along with cock-a-leekie at a kilt fest they also eat a dish called “potted hough” Now, I’ve been with many potted ho’s in my time but not when me sporran was busting out from me filibeg.

 

The kilt is part and parcel of a killer kilt cult that includes Angus of AC/DC among others and they appear at many a Celtic Festival with Highland Pipers and piping hot lassies with thigh high filibegs that beg for attention from your invisible sporran!

 

Yes for those of you dying to know..there are Kilt Strip Clubs from the UK to Brazil where you can party until the long haired Highland cows come home. Besides...a Brazilian in a kilt is the 9th wonder of the world no matter how you toss the cabor!

So Kilt Up America! Stop wondering what a Scotsman or Scotswoman wears under his or her kilts. Don’t be afraid...be a Mel Gibson “Braveheart” and let your “berry banger “ do your talking before ye go daft!  

Chapter 23