The Art of Vision

Last night:
Los Campesinos!, Romance is Boring
Cyril Vetter, Dirtdobber Blues

Today:
The Flaming Lips, "I Found a Star on the Ground" (via Blurt and Slow Nerve Action's SoundCloud)

• Frank is right; Snapseed is a boss iPad photo editor. I thought original of the above was a pretty good shot until I started seeing what else it could look like. Imagine if I embraced subtlety as a creative dictate!
   
• Making a public note to myself to settle down and see things as they are.
    
• I might be too close to Dirtdobber Blues to give it an objective review: my class is doing an digital marketing plan for it, same publisher as my forthcoming book, I know personally some of the people in the book, and my house is down the street from one of the locations in which shoulda-been Louisiana singer-songwriter Butch Hornsby's troubled yet charmed life plays out. I can say the people and places I know are depicted accurately, and that Butch, who I didn't know, comes vividly alive.
  
  Butch thrives in accelerated glory time, when the world seemingly stands still while he drunkenly destroys/builds the mythic presence that sustains him when he downshifts into human time, where the pound of flesh gets collected. Similarly, Vetter's prose is the most lucid in the glory days, though at points during the quiet years, you can almost hear the tree frogs in the yard.
  
  The Kindle version begins each chapter with a link to a song (nice touch!); the paper book comes with a CD, both allowing the reader to tap into Butch's unique gifts as a songwriter, as a visual artist - his primitivist paintings and collages permeate the text as well. You get to know a guy you wish you'd known, which seems the highest compliment one can pay a biography. If you are a Bobby Charles, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker type, you need some Butch Hornsby in your liquor cabinet.
  (x-posted to Goodreads and Amazon)
   
• I just let the six-hour Flaming Lips song play away in my office all day, even when I wasn't in there. I feel it will activate the surfaces of my area in the manner of my pleasing. Leave its sparkle.
  
   The Flaming Lips - I Found a Star On the Ground [Part One of Three] by Slow•Nerve•Action 3
   The Flaming Lips - I Found a Star On the Ground [Part Two of Three] by Slow•Nerve•Action 2
   The Flaming Lips - I Found a Star On the Ground [Part Three of Three] by Slow•Nerve•Action
      
• I once went to see Stan Brakhage's The Art of Vision, a six-hour deconstructive remake of his already long Dog Star Man. Only me and one other guy made it through the whole thing; I'm pretty sure Stan Brakhage himself was sitting up in the back row of the Anthology Film Archives theatre and even he left early. After the show, I shook the hand of the other guy and asked if he wanted to get a drink, thinking we'd just seen a thing only a handful of people had plus I was being a gregarious Southerner loose in New York City. He said he was going to ask the projectionist if he could watch it again.
  
  
  Stan Brakhage, Dog Star Man (Prelude) Imagine this but 6 hours long.