the scene at the wrong place

Here is the scene at the wrong place mentioned in the Little Big Store article.

Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable
Buzzcocks, A Different Kind of Tension
The Undertones, The Undertones
The Adverts, Cast of Thousands
The Clash, Give 'Em Enough Rope

Media: The May 2001 of Country Roads has hit the stands with my trip through the hidden world of Baton Rouge's Italian delis. OK there are only three of them, but they are still relatively hidden and each in their own way, awesome places to eat.  Also, I get lost in the hills of central Mississippi to find the greatest record store in the world, the Little Big Store in tiny Raymond, MS. It was a little sobering to finish up this piece just as the Compact Disc Store, the last great independent, full-spectrum record store in the city, was closing up shop for good just in time for Record Store Day. Sometimes it's just how we do things here; put out fires with wet blankets.

Time ran out on me to get a Record Crate out for 225 this week. There are festivals everywhere through, so this guide from the April issue should point you toward what to do. Really, just drive in pretty much any direction and you will be confronted with massive festivity.

One thing Treme gets right is the difference between bar life here and elsewhere. The chef-in-exile sits alone in a bar in NYC, the ex-pat jazz-musician gets pulled into a jockeying race for justification with other jazz musicians at some posh uptown locale, meanwhile back in New Orleans it is a congenial, familial ruckus, everywhere you go. It is something that features heavily in my book;  in south Louisiana, our public sphere overlaps that of the private, forming a 3-D Venn diagram that resembles an hourglass or giant butt cheeks, depending on the angle. It can be infuriating for outsiders/newcomers that don't want to be touchy-feely about every mundane transaction, that can't handle the endlessly participatory give-and-take life requires here, but then the heat, mosquitoes and bad schools eventually run those people off anyway.

Last night I dog-eared a page of The Unnameable that I thought deftly illustrated this, but this morning it seems the sheer consumptive density of the text evidently un-bent my page, resisted any extraction of its swampy whole to make a point, perhaps because not only is there no point, but there is now whole from which a point can be made. It's a fun summer read! James Franco should make the movie in his spare time between graduate programs.


Also from the Little Big Store. So psychedelic that modern means can't bring it into focus.


Buzzcocks, "Are Everything." I completely forgot about this song. And how much I love it. And everything! And I've never heard "What Do You Know" with the horns! Love the Buzzcocks!