Wonderful.

April Hammock, Relics from an Alien Nation. Graphite.

There is a lot of great stuff on display this month at Baton Rouge Gallery, but I'm rather drawn (ahem) to this stonerific drawing by Ms. Hammock. It reminds me of Conrad (member of ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead) Keely's ball-point drawings, which in turn reminds me of filling high school notebooks with marginalia which is really all I want to do with my life.

Collum McCann, Let The Great World Spin
David Bowie, The Buddha of Suburbia
The Monochrome Set, Westminster Affair
Brian Eno, The BBC Sessions (thanks, ROOT BLOG)
David Bowie, Hunky Dory
Arab Strap, Monday at the Hug and Pint

• Walking into the building this morning, I heard the roar of an airplane overhead and immediately started into "Back in the U.S.S.R." We might be reaching Beatles-saturation at our house. 
• Last night at the pool I started going "Wonderful....Wonderful..." in response to something Maya said, fully convinced she would pick up on it because it was part of whatever song on Abbey Road that leads into "The End" but nope, it's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" off Ziggy Stardust. I thought in vain hope, maybe I can get her to latch onto David Bowie, and then thought about the Awl's tidy force ranking of the Bowie records (I dunno, I'm kinda all about Hunky Dory) and then about how I've never listened to any of those "new" Bowie albums, like really, any after Never Let me Down which came out twenty-three years ago and then, O Lord, twenty-three years ago? Something that is over twenty years old is "new" to me now? Wonderful. So let's hear one of them new ones like The Buddha of Suburbia (eh, not bad, alternately soundtrack (which it is) and catchy hair-salon pop) which is only sixteen years old, which is probably the right age to go through one's Bowie phase. 
• I'm not really given to age anxiety but I kinda don't want to run the numbers and find out Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil came out fifty years ago or something, or that Appetite for Destruction was first released on wax cylinder, available to homesteaders via Sears & Roebuck Co. stagecoach mailorder.
• The Monochrome Set! The smartypants faction of the B-Sides left behind when the rest went on to become Adam & the Ants!
  
  
  The Monochrome Set, "Cast a Long Shadow"
  
  
• Let the Great World Spin is mesmerizing, fabulous in its structure and detail, but is now the third fourth (forgot about Goon Squad) novel-in-stories-with-a-composite-yet-serial-protagonist-narrator-train-deal-going-on in a row I've read and, while it makes me want to write one myself now, I'm ready to read, like, you know, a story or some non-fiction, something that is just about something already. You post-structuralists get off my goddamn lawn! I wave my cane at you!