--> minotaurs

Susan Cowsill said we beat the shit out of Monroe on "Flower Girl". More at my YouTube Page.

Susan Cowsill, Red Dragon, Baton Rouge, 8/7/2010
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros, Rock Art & the X-Ray Style
No Age, Loosing Feeling
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story 
Hawkwind,  In Search of Space

Media Announcement: I sing the praises of  Susan Cowsill, her performance last week at the Red Dragon, and how we beat Monroe (see the above video) in the sing-a-long in this week's installment of my 225 blog, The Record Crate.

God, Gary Sheytgart will totally make you want to delete your  Facebook account. The delirious scenes of data streaming and rankings and people glued to devices in public places is so eerily familiar to my own life. While reading Super Sad on my lunch break I have two email accounts open on my two montiors* before me and my phone consolidating those two and two others on the table next to me, and when email shows up as a shudder in my peripheral vision - the same way dinosaurs saw prey according to Jurassic Park - I count the seconds until my phone buzzes, acknowledging its receipt of that message. I really have gotten only one email today worth reading,  the one Stephen Elliot of the Rumpus sends, and I replied back to tell him so. But ugh, this book makes me feel weak and unduly augmented by trivial things, like a robot made of junk, and I'd go take a quick walk to shake it off, but I have to go show someone how to work a video camera.

* I accidentally typed minotors --> minotaurs, multiples of the bull/man monster** of the Labyrinth of Crete that demands the sacrifice of strong supple men and virgin girls every year, only to be slain by the hero Theseus hiding among the offered. Super Sad is partially about a hapless book reader lost in post-Everything tailspin America, buoyed only by love, and I feel a little like him right now.


** It seems important to mention that in the myth, Theseus is a son of Poseidon and the Minotaur is the mutant offspring of a bull gifted to King Minos of Crete and the king's wife Pasiphaë,who was compelled by Aphrodite to fall in love with the bull. Bastard son is to battle the bastard object of the father's cuckolding in the maze which he had built by Daedalus and Icarus, the too-close-to-the-sun kid. Like that's how it always goes down.