Somewhere Here On Earth
a return to books
John M. Carrera’s Pictorial Webster’s
‘black gold’!
“The greatest oil strike in the history of Southern California, the Prospect Hill field! The inside of the earth seemed to burst out through that hole; a roaring and rushing, as Niagrara, and a black column shot up into the air, two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty—no one could say for sure—and came thundering down to earth as a mass of thick, black slimy, slippery fluid. It hurled tools and other heavy objects this way and that, so the men had to run for their lives. It filled the sump-hole, and poured over, like a sauce-pan boiling too fast, and went streaming down the hillside. Carried by the wind, a curtain of black mist, it sprayed the Culver homestead, turning it black, and sending the women of the household flying across the cabbage-fields. Afterwards it was told with Homeric laughter how these women had been heard to lament the destruction of their clothing and their window-curtains by this million-dollar flood of ‘black gold’!”
—Upton Sinclair, Oil!, 1927.
Texas tea
“And up through the ground came a bubblin’ crude.
Oil, that is. Black gold, Texas tea.”
—Paul Henning, ‘The Ballad of Jed Clampett,’ 1962.
the green toe of her left slipper
“I went away wondering why the green toe of her left slipper was dark and damp with something that could have been blood.”
—Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 1929.
Japanese Barcodes
This is Roxy Music
Carsick Cars
Say, can I have some of your purple berries
“Say, can I have some of your purple berries
Yes, I’ve been eating them for six or seven weeks now
Haven’t got sick once
Prob’ly keep us both alive”
—David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Paul Kantner, ‘Wooden Ships’, 1969.