como se llama

An ad for the Massachusetts State Fair (a.k.a. "the Big E") from the September 21, 2007 edition of the [Woburn] Daily Times Chronicle:


There's a thin line between whimsy and creepiness.

In other Big E news, the fair's planned performance by Ludacris was cancelled due to low ticket sales. Did the bigwigs in charge of booking musical acts mistakenly assume that his frequent mentions of "hoes" referred to the gardening tool? Or maybe they thought that folks who'd travel cross-state to gawk at giant pumpkins would be open to songs like "P(ussy)-Poppin'" and "Pimpin' All Over the World."

On a more depressing note, the fair's performances by Brooke Hogan and Taylor Hicks went on as planned.

Martin Denny - Llama Serenade (from Forbidden Island/Primitiva, 1958) - After decades of intense study (including several missteps involving Doris Day and Arthur Lyman recordings) zoologists have discovered llamas respond really well to vibraphone-heavy exotica.

Love Tractor - Llama (from This Ain't No Outer Space Ship, 1987) - One of the lesser lights of the Athens, GA scene, though I give them full props for being groovy enough to incorporate wakka-chikka effects into this track. If only R.E.M. had been that bold...

visual synergy: all's fun at the fair

"It's guaranteed to make you puke." Not a statement usually used to pitch a product or experience, but twelve-year old boys are a different species entirely. The engine of induced regurgitation being referenced was the Tilt-A-Whirl, one of many lurid and potentially dangerous attractions at the annual Boys' Club carnival. (The club only sponsored the event, the administration of which was handled by those semi-nomadic purveyors of fried dough, chancy rides, and rigged games of chance colloquially known as "carny folk.")

The arrival of the carnival at the vacant lot abutting the Northeast Trade Center in North Woburn was always a time of wonder and delight, though never so much so as in the spring of 1984. Previous trips had been made under the watchful eyes and tight purse strings of parents or other adult chaperones, but having turned twelve, and thus standing at the crossroads of childhood hijinx and adolescent angst, this marked the first time my friends and I were able to attend the carnival alone and unsupervised, free of admonishments about our sugar and trans fat intakes, the no-win nature of the midway games, and our suitability for trying out the coolest and most dangerous-looking of the rides.

Even better, the fairgrounds were less than a mile from the neighborhood where we lived, well within easy biking distance. The only thing that prevented us from attending the carnival every single night it was in local residence was the lack of parental largess once we had burned up our initial stores of ready cash.

While our money lasted, though, we wandered the stalls and attractions in hopes of winning a amateurish reproduction of a Led Zeppelin or Blue Oyster Cult LP cover painted onto a sharp-edged sheet of glass (which one of the older kid's told me were for sniffing cocaine of off, making it the peaked-in-high-school set's equivalent of a gold-plated spoon) from the goldfish game, or to check out the assortment of hard-used and dated arcade machines (Joust! Berzerk!) set up in an army surplus tent on the edge of the lot overlooking the Zayre's parking lot. The carnival had a open city vibe to it, where groups of kids from different parts of the city would meet up and form temporary alliances.

It was one of the kids from the subdivided hinterlands near the Burlington line, a classmate of mine (due to Woburn's unintuitive boundaries for elementary school districts) who made the above case for the Tilt-A-Whirl's superiority vis-a-vis the Flying Bobs, the Round-Up, or the giant ferris wheel with enclosed spinnable cars. "It's guaranteed to make you puke," he said, and the unspoken challenge contained in his endorsement could not be denied. So the members of our group paired up and gave it a shot.

Rumors about that "kid from two towns over" who lost an arm in the ride aside (and those rumors were as ubiquitous to the carnival's atmosphere as the smells of frying medium and whiskey breath^*), a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl doesn't really instill roller coaster levels of adrenalin-spiked terror. Functionally, the ride is only a step or two up from the kiddie merry-go-rounds featuring bright plastic race cars in place of horses, with a stiff dose of centrifugal force to add some kick.

And it's that force, acting upon a belly packed to the esophagus with junk food and soda, that produces the effect my classmate vouched for. At the ride's conclusion, my friends and I staggered off the exit gantry, and one by one proceeded to lean over and spew forth steaming primitivist murals of half-digested candy apples and popcorn onto the blank canvas of dust and trampled grass before us, all to the oohs, ahhs, and ewwws of the other kids watching. There was even a pointed critiquing session of our efforts, in which I fared rather poorly.

Lack of texture and poor spread radius. It's the story of my life, really.

Wow, that ran longer than planned. Are you ready for a music video thrill ride of thrills. excitement, and cheaply made teddy bears filled with styrofoam pellets? The management asks that you keep your arms and other appendages inside the car at all times.


Dire Straits - Tunnel of Love - The Warsaw Pact's superiority in bumper car technology was completely offset by NATO's fleet of state-of-the-art canal barges.


Depeche Mode - Get the Balance Right - Now watch as we go from moody...


Madness - House of Fun - ...to joyously goofy...


Lush - Hypocrite - ...to gloomy introspection in the course of this non-stop merry-go-round called "life."

Madness - House of Fun (from Madness, 1983)

Lush - Hypocrite (from Split, 1994)

^* Maura, who did grow up two towns over from Woburn, says that there was a bona fide carnival-related mutilation back in the day, which could very well be the ur-text from which the stories sprung.