quartet of stars

I wonder if Charla was trying to turn then into KISS. It would have been so awesome if she had.

The Clash, Sandinista!
Blake Butler, There is No Year

• I was on the radio this morning and will be again this evening, (4:44 PM CST WRKF 89.3) talking about Louisiana blues artist Guitar Gable, particularly about this record:
  
  
  Guitar Gable & His Musical Kings, A: "Life Problem" / B: "Congo Mombo"
  
  Here's the story with the commentary on the WRKF website.
  
  
• Maya was impressed and particularly excited that "They have a new font on the website! Remember how it used to go across the whole page?" She also offered, "Next time you can use one of my records instead of this old grandpa fart music."
  
  
• The interior of the copy of Sgt. Peppers she got this weekend  is pleasingly defiled by its previous owner, a Ms. Charla White. We know this because her name in scrawled right above William S. Burroughs' head in the famed cover montage. There is a subject no one has broached in the perpetual bemoaning of the digital dawn: how are the youth of today going to mar up an mp3 file with their name? Scribble it on a bunch of ones and zeroes?! I swan at the implications of this new age! How can one make it "my copy" of Sgt. Peppers without a physical form? Is anything "yours" anymore?
  
  
• Books: I finished War & War and over at the Goodreads gave it a cautious and rambling quartet of stars, a high score for a book that I'm not sure I understood at all. I dubbed its massive sentence/chapters as "zip lines to the vanishing point" and said, "you read books like War and War to confront the void and boom, there it is!"
  
  I started Blake Butler's There Is No Year, I guess because I never learn my lesson about difficult books. I keed, Butler has some very cool, singular things going on in his prose and the means by which he delivers his prose. This grim family account reads like an Asbergers A.M. Homes caught in the House of Leaves, spread out on grayed pages in poetic layout and really, it works, but the tiny text on gray paper is physically hard to read and maybe that's his point. Scorch Atlas was like that, set up like a waterlogged artifact from the endtimes; this is walking a different withered treeline.
  
  Anyway, Butler's boy finds a box or something and
  
  it contained the missing seventh and eighth sides of the Clash's Sandinista!, written by a presence never mentioned in the band, which when played at a specific volume at a certain vector would invoke an unremembered form of light - and a song deleted from that missing album - lyrics deleted from that song - code words deleted from that language - time -
  
  which to me is funny; if Sandinista! was a song longer it would have to be its own radio station.
  
  
• I teach my first Digital Branding class, starting but an hour from now! Here's hoping the students understand digital living better than I do!