Fairytale In The Supermarket

[koganbot]

Yesterday my girlfriend and I heard, piped into the King Soopers supermarket on Speer and 14th, near where I work (serves a Hispanic neighborhood to the west, downtown to the east, Auraria Campus to the north), Television's "See No Evil." I'd certainly never heard anything like it — classic Velvets-Byrds-Wagner derived avant garage from the first CBGB era — in a major supermarket chain before. (King Soopers is Kroger's outlet on the Wyoming/Colorado Front Range.) Was followed up by a surf instrumental, then '60s pop hit "Georgy Girl."

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Today, at the King Soopers on Evans and Carr, a few blocks south of where I live in heavily Hispanic west Denver, the guy in front of me complimented a woman working checkout by telling her she had a lovely necklace and asking whose picture it featured. "It's a Korean group, GOT7. Sorta hip-hop and dance," she explained. I spoke up: "I know GOT7. They're the latest on JYP," I added, in order to appear knowledgeable. The woman was about 22, seemingly Anglo.* As she rang up my order, I asked her what other K-pop she listened to, and she said her other best band was Infinite. "Oh yeah," I said, "'Be Mine.'" "That's one of their best songs," she said. She said that SHINee was also one of her favorites, but that GOT7 and Infinite were the ones she liked most. "Have good listening," I said, as I carted off my groceries.

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Of course, GOT7 have zilch to do with Television, or CBGB. But notice that the love interest in the supermarket in GOT7's "A" is wearing a T-shirt of another classic CBGB act.

*By "Anglo" I mean non-Hispanic Caucasian; I'd be considered "Anglo" by this def'n, even though my ancestry is Eastern and Central European Jew.

Comments

happy new year dude!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

for some (ignorant: i just googled it) reason i'd always imagined the surname "kogan" to be irish! mine is also almost certainly east european jewish -- on facial feature my sister and i both get the assumption now and then, her more than me -- tho if it is an ancestor (probably in liverpool) assimilated so rigorously that no word ever trickled down... my dad's father used to insist (a bit too often; a bit too defensively) that it was an old anglo-saxon name: but surely if it were we'd occasionally encounter other sinkers who didn't turn out to be second cousins? anyway, it's left us both without a trace of heritage except a vague sense of affinity (for jews but for immigrants generally i think)

my local supermarket used to have a terrific line in completely unexpected music -- never television but some very non-chart stuff. it was taken over by the massive chain sainsbury's a few years back, which means it's now more expensive, the meat is less dodgy, and there's never any music. (they re-employed all the same staff, i'm glad to say)

as usual i have been majorly derailed from answers i promised you -- they are a pile of half-worked on notes -- more in the next couple of weeks i hope xxx

Re: happy new year dude!

[koganbot]

Hogan, Cogan, and Coogan are all Irish. But Kogan is what happens when the Jewish surname "Cohen" is transliterated into Russian. The surname contains the claim that I'm descended from Jewish priests at the time of the Temple (Wikip reports that "Kohen"/"Cohen" is the Hebrew word for priest) and that I'm directly descended from Aaron brother of Moses.

From "Squeezed From The Tube," originally published in Why Mildred Skis #5, though you might also recognize it from Part 6 ("Fuck Machines And Razor Blades") of Real Punks Don't Wear Black:

Once, when my mother worked for the Massachusetts Housing Authority, she went to see the mayor of Springfield. He boomed out across to her as she entered his office, "Mrs. Hogan, you don't look Irish, but I'm pleased to meet you."

They did business with this firm that my mother called "St. Louis Hit and Run" (real name was St. Louis Screw and Bolt).

["They" being the Housing Authority, not Mom and her nonpaisano in the Springfield city government.]

Re: happy new year dude!

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I feel sorry for my kids, who both have a Scottish first name and an Irish last name (technically they both have Hebrew names, though that almost never comes up), in addition to an atheist dad and an ambivalent mom, and they'll have to run around going, "No, Jewish, really."

(My mother's father's family emigrated from newly-independent [IIRC] Hungary in 1920, in a spot of really fantastic timing; the understanding of my mother's mother's family is murkier but we think they came over from what is now Latvia in the 1880s or so.)

anyway, bless that cashier, and if it had been me I would have probably hugged her and squeed and driven everyone in line behind me crazy for ten minutes.

Punk/early-80s shirts on K-pop acts is... a thing? I distinctly remember Jiyoon wearing a Joy-Division-themed shirt during "Is It Poppin?" live performances, and I know I've seen "Punk's Not Dead" live at least once (on Jinyoung during B1A4's end-of-the-year perf in 2013). (Okay, I went and looked up the 4Minute archives, and found "DIE, HIPPIE SCUM" on backup dancers here. But I can't find the Jiyoon shirt I was thinking of.)

I found that Marquee Moon was a good match for my mood yesterday afternoon, so thank you for that.

All K-Pop is temporary K-Pop?

[davidfrazer.livejournal.com]

I looked up the quotation on HyunA's t-shirt from that performance, and it's an installation by artist Robert Montgomery. It occurs to me that it could be interpreted as a comment on the ephemeral nature of pop music, pop stardom, etc. etc...