Now I feel I should smash a donut

Shearwater - The Golden Archipelago (at NPR)
Gowns - "Stand" (mp3 from somewhere via Pitchfork)
Joanna Newsom - "Kingfisher" (via Drag City)
Edmar Castaneda: Tiny Desk Concert (at NPR)
The Sea and Cake - The Sea and Cake

These donuts scattered across a parking lot were the second weird thing I almost stepped on during my walk home from the bus yesterday evening. The first was a freshly dead pigeon, laying on its side in the grass. I'm not sure which would have been more distressing. Feeling the crunch of bird bones beneath your feet should send up a shudder in anyone, but the squish and grind of a donut into concrete... I don't know.

There might be some singular poetry in such an action, the kind of territory only performance artists dare to tread. A friend who lived in NYC in the early 80's when the island was wild with transgression told me she and a performance artist friend would do things like take a bit of any apple found on the sidewalk or a swig from a beer left on top of a newspaper box, literally ingest the city. She accompanied him once to a performance at some arts college where he ground up fresh flowers between two bricks. Even now I can hear that crumbly, scraping sound...

Now I feel I should smash a donut in a parking lot, so that experience can be sent out into the world. Maybe if the birds haven't eaten them all by the time I head home. Maybe it will feel like this:



The Sea and Cake - "Bring My Car I Feel to Smash it" live at the Bowery Ballroom, NYC 11/10/2008

I dunno how I feel about Joanna Newsom. I want to like this stuff more than I do, which is troubling because I want to like it very much. My opinion of it was unfairly clouded by this NPR concert by Colombian harp player Edmar Castaneda, whose warp on Latin jazz through his instrument is perhaps what it felt like when Zeus impregnated Danaë in the form of golden rain. Better than smashing donuts, to be sure.

why I like having a university library at my disposal during my lunch break

Shearwater - The Golden Archipelago (streaming at NPR)
Various Artists - The Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol 1 - Ballads

Just because we wear sequined suits doesn't mean we think we're great, it means we think sequins are great.
Gram Parsons, from the quote page of Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and his Cosmic American Music.

Traces blurs signs no meaning light grey almost white. Bare white body fixed white on white invisible.
Samuel Beckett, "Ping" from The Complete Short Prose, 1929 - 1989

His talk was seldom of geodesy.
Samuel Beckett, "Enough" also from The Complete Short Prose, 1929 - 1989

A few notes: I read Twenty Thousand Roads a while back and I can't remember if it was good or not. If I'm thinking the right book, it seemed to pin a lot of "his" Cosmic Americana on Gram being a rich man's stepson. I suspect more significant forces were at play. Anyway, I think that quote speaks volumes about the mythic meaning vs. biography of rock stars.

I never really quite know what is going on in those super dense Beckett pieces like "Ping", but I love the way his words can scatter to the corners like roaches when you flip on the kitchen light.

I think I do know what is going on in "Enough" with the above line being the only thing that made me chuckle in an otherwise ice-cold story possibly about a pedophiliac relationship. In the interest of gazing through kaleidoscope of learned academic viewpoints, this from the Amazon product description of a book of Beckett analysis:

In a chapter on Beckett's "Enough", Blau concedes that parts of the playwright's work can be lyrical and beguiling, but "it's still an appalling vision". Esslin (who coined the term "theater of the absurd") challenges the notion that Beckett is difficult or depressing, arguing instead that he is basically a comic writer, gallows humor thought it be.

I got the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music from there as well, saving me from hunting down my own copy and reintroducing me to this Coley Jones song, which has a Beckettian inevitability to it, where the protagonist must forever trudge on through the charade to get to the end he spies from the get-go. I'm not sure what the image of the Grand Canyon in this video is supposed to represent. Perhaps it is the chasm between that which we desire and that which we are granted.



Also the library has a coffee shop on the ground floor. I like that as well.

stoking the mythology engine

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig! (lala)
The Who - Live at Leeds (lala)
The White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan (lala)

Watching the Saints win the Super Bowl was as explosive as the camellias' vivid display to the blue blue sky. My neighborhood did not go batshit like they did for the NFC championship, but I suspect the ones with the real party artillery were down in the city contributing to this kind of mayhem.



This glimmer of spring makes me wanna get my swagger on, and the last non-soundtrack Nick cave is a great record with which to swagger. It is everything that I couldn't quite get off the Patti Smith record the other day: convulsive, turbulent, cocksure, lacing the glorious ego of rock with a strychnine trace of self-deprecation.

We Call Upon The Author - Nick...

Somebody came by my office to talk about the Super Bowl and mentioned that they never really listened to the Who before, and instead of following my instinct to summon the ninjas and have his throat cut, I put on Live at Leeds and let him bask in their ragged glory. The intro/explanation to "A Quick One" is too long an unnecessarily detailed but the train is unstoppable when it gets rolling. Who knows if it made him convert; you can hardly tell anyone anything anymore.

A Quick One, While He's Away (...

We got talking on the subject of ego and rock star dickishness and I stand firm that pop culture will slide into the ocean if we desire all our rock stars be decent, folksy people. I'm surrounded by decent folksy people all day; I want to consort with Vikings, demons, mankind-destroying scientists and drunken philosophers in my headphone time. Not always, but sorta always. Like, I bet Jack White is a petulant ass to be around, and probably some yahoo will emerge to profess his dude-bro-chillness and both opinions should be scrapped and tossed into the coal box that stoking the mythology engine behind something simple and ferocious like this.

Blue Orchid - The White Stripe...

The Damned are happily indifferent

Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets (lala)
Patti Smith - "Ask the Angels"
The Clash - Combat Rock (lala)
The Damned - Damned, Damned, Damned (lala)

The above were taken in the stairwell of the parking garage by the farmer's market yesterday, one from up looking down, the other looking back up to the sky.

I had a disco-not-disco mood creep up on me while Patti Smith and I did the dishes. Perfect a song as I think "Ask the Angels" is, she has nary a disco bone in that skinny body of hers, whereas the Clash have to work to not let the music take control. The Damned are happily indifferent.

Baby's On Fire - Brian Eno

Ask the Angels - Patti Smith G...

Overpowered By Funk - The Clas...

Fan Club - The Damned

Downtown Baton Rouge was looking enigmatic from up high; I suppose we don't get elevated so much around here.



This has been a weekend of glorious breakfasts: yesterday the Devonshire Tea Service at Strand's (I was previously unaware scones were worth eating, much less understanding that they are the best thing in the world when properly prepared and served with lemon curd and clotted cream) and this morning, waffles with Linn's Olallieberry Topping at home. Mine is a life of humbling privilege.



Appetite whetted for Superbowl party food down the street, non-NFL-sanctioned merch donned,hoping the Who and the Saints get cro-mag scrappy on this football spectacle bs - the day is rife with possibilty!

Speaking of spectacle and scrappy, my favorite thing from the Krewe of Orion parade last night, the Unique Dancers. We got a little excited about their appearance.

Another idea worth exploring

The Incredible String Band - The Big Huge (lala)
Blind Willie Johnson - "John the Revelator"

My morning coffee looms large and foreboding, but like everything, from the written word to the Mountain of God, it will eventually be surmounted by those compelled to make the first step, and the wisdom gained will be disseminated in the inevitable post-trip slideshow.

The Mountain Of God - The Incr...

Should any of you want to buy or send me this new book out on Harry Smith, will gladly read it, thank you profusely, and hopefully dissect it as deftly Alexander Provan did in this Bookforum review. I have prattled on about Mr. Smith before; his Anthology of American Folk Music, his films, his presence and prescience all are profound inspirations.

This song, which can found in Smith's Anthology, was likely an inspiration for that John the Revelator book I just read.



There is an illuminating interview with the author Peter Murphy by my outsideleft colleague Joe Ambrose, further exploring that idea.

So yeah, exploring. I just explored this soul food lunch from Zeeland St. Market*. Worth the trip every time.



* Why do restaurants tend to have jacked-up low-rent websites? Another idea worth exploring.

my name is wild

Guided By Voices - Propeller, Vampire on Titus, The Pipe Dream of Prince Whippet, Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia, Same Place the Fly Got Smashed, and Under the Bushes Under the Stars (lala where available)
Thin Lizzy - Vagabonds of the Western World (lala)

All this exercise taught me is something I already knew: UTBUTS is just the best record. Robert Pollard's meta title word debris becomes polemic: Your Name is Wild, Man Called Aerodynamics, The Official Ironmen Rally Song, It's Like Soul Man. The stadium is tight around him as he rages away in his drunken room, a protective bubble, a lubricant to allow the star-shaped peg of his animus navigate the holes of squares.

"Liar's Tale" from Self-Inflicted... is the one lucid moment in here that really drew me in. There is nothing there, just a trembling, barely touched guitar, a song about a story that doesn't really get told. It sounds like a jambox in the parking lot playing a Thin Lizzy song.

A friend recently accused the world of not listening to enough Thin Lizzy. I stand by that accusation, and am doing my part. Robert Pollard would rather we listen to Phil Lynott than him on this Guided By Voices Day. Whose voice do you think is doing the guiding?

The Rocker (Album Version) - T...

Speaking of, I set up all kinds of push message settings to my phone, and now the goofy thing just buzzes all the time, leaving me to wonder Is it a message? My move in Scrabble? Some dumbass status update comment? At dull moments it is like a tiny Christmas morning, but otherwise it is a sweetly ineffective irony machine commenting on the state of communication saying little more than "Hey". I should install a John Cage 4' 33" ringtone and assign it to those alerts just to further drive the point home/off.

Speaking of that, and being in command of yr bon mots, The Posthuman Dada Guide, is an endless parade of great coffee shop pronouncements. You almost get white-out from the torrents of cleverness, which might be the greater purposeless purpose of Dada (loudly declaring nothing) vs the omnimedia of the common status-heap (demurely saying everything).

I got my mildly controversial, lococouture, semi-bootleg Saints merch today. I'm ready for whatever taxonomist ridiculousness you have. Go Team!

Sheetkickers - Guided By Voice...

Happy Guided By Voices Day!

C'mon! Everybody's doing it! I don't know why everybody's doing it, but they are! Be a scientist, a tree, a rock star! The voices give you the go ahead! You and me are in a band as of right now! Karate kick! Indecipherable lyric! Hook! Go!