dust collection

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Sherlock
Owl & the Pussycat, Owl & the Pussycat
10 Secs from Every Hit Song of the '90s (via WFMU's Beware of the Blog)
World Party, Private Revolution
Bombay Bicycle Club, A Different Kind of Fix
Matthew Dear, Headcage
Chick Corea/Eddie Gomez/Paul Motian, Further Exploations
Ultra-slow version of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" (via YouTube)

I finished Nutsack. I'll have a formalized review forthcoming somewhere/how for Nutsack is a book that calls for one, but really, I think I just like saying "nutsack." Who doesn't?

I watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams last night on Netflix on my iPad and had a salient point to make about how they know it is the same cave painter throughout because his/her handprint has a crooked little finger, and how you put your crooked little fingers on the iPad screen to make things happen and that when I went to put my hand on his, the movie stopped and it was a meta-cave-drawing-discovery, frozen in time. That wasn't the point I had at the  time, but that point is now lost. I also liked how there are preserved cave bear tracks in the dust.

I did almost nothing this weekend but watch season 2 of BBC One's Sherlock on the laptop, and I could talk about the sensation of watching a detective genius on his laptop on my laptop, but the point I'm working is there is a scene where old Sher is trying to clear his name on something and wanting to know if his housekeeper (who forever claims to be not his housekeeper) if his room had been dusted. "In dust lies the truth" he claims with great dramatic flourish, or something to that effect.

Sherlock is great TV, my favorite show going. The English, through the focused projector of The BBC Dramatic Series, understand how to work an archetype. These episodes are based on the old stories, the original episodes as it were, and yet are fresh. You want to know how old horsey Benedict Cumberbatch manifests the great detective's opium problem or his seedy connections, and it all falls perfectly into place like dust in a sunbeam. The hat becomes a great meta-joke.

My friend Clarke and I had a conversation about swamp pop, a curious strain of oldies as practiced here in South Louisiana. I mentioned that in writing my book, it was the music I was least prepared to embrace really, but I've come to love it. It's like when Jasper Johns painted that same flag over and over different ways, images the mind already knows is his phrase, I believe. These swamp pop guys take the tiredest of old songs and breathe stunning life into them.

Speaking of old songs, or maybe just dust collection, I got an email that World Party was assembling a 5CD collection of hits and outtakes. Didn't they just have the one song, albeit a good one?


World Party, "Ship of Fools"

but then I remembered "Private Revolution" with hot ass Sinead O'Connor shimmying in the background


World Party, "Private Revolution"

In 1987, it was pointless to try to not sound like Prince, whose revolution was unstoppable. We all wanted to look like Karl Wallinger and have someone who looked like Sinead O'Connor dancing like that behind us.