Tuesday, July 31, 2012

I'm reading books!

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I got your iron rooster right here! To ride, even!

Saturday:
The Fall, Grotesque (After the Gramme)

Sunday:
Blut Aus Nord, 777 - Sect(s)
Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
Dead Boys, Young, Loud, and Snotty
Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
César Aira, Vamaro


Monday:
Redd Kross, Researching the Blues (via NPR)
Rodriguez, Searching for Sugar Man

Tuesday:
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster
Jimbo Mathus, Blue Light and Knockdown South
Barrence Whitfield & the Savages, Ow! Ow! Ow!
The Moonstones, Fuzz, farfisa y fiesta
Dylan LeBlanc, Cast the Same Old Shadow
Peter Bruntnell, Normal for Bridgewater

I'm reading books!



Varamo (Narrativas Hispanicas)Varamo by César Aira
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have a thing for South American poets that write novels about poets that are chasing poetry like a runaway kite. Especially in their short books. This has that charged kind of prose found on Bolaño's By Night In Chile or Aira's own weirdly cool How I Became a Nun, without being quite as good as either of those.  I read this cover to cover sitting by the pool in 98° heat and it flew by without either the reader or the protagonist quite knowing what was going on or why we were following the trail this narrative was cutting, but we did anyway, ignoring the sun and the people having fun with their stupid lives just steps away. I think that's the message these self-righteous Chilean badasses are talking about - the real life is dogged, foolish, and will lead you away from the imagined life everyone else lives. I don't fully buy all that, but it is nice to run with this crowd for 70-80 pages or so and then jump in the pool.



Child of GodChild of God by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Devastating, brutal, and if one is honest with the filthy clown chuckling in the shadows of the heart's crawlspace, kinda funny. As funny as a story about a necrophiliac killer can be. The smartest thing he does in Child of God is set it up as a your general Southern "we are all really as bad as each other is" gothic morality flattener and then reveals that, no, some of us are significantly worse than others. The worst among us retains some humanity - we just want to be loved, is that so wrong? Apparently, that is judged on a case by case basis. That nascent humanity doesn't temper one's horror, in fact, that broken humanity actually worsens one's worseness. So yeah. Thanks, Cormac McCarthy.

I found the book to be ate up with the Persephone myth, but then I think most books about relative innocence being confronted with evil to be so, so I don't think this helps much.

It would be impossibly, blackly hilarious if this book were to be found on the shelves of a Blue Ridge tourist cavern gift shop.

View all my reviews up on the GoodReads

Also, I continue to be drawn to Just Kids in the same manner that Patti and Robert find every damn thing to be a talisman that reminds her of Rimbaud or something. I highlighted some particularly egregious passage but it looks like the Kindle ate the note, as if to say, don't go put that on the Internet. I should lighten up on her. It's still a good book. Anyways, what has Patti Smith ever done to me beside give me and the world Easter and this awesome song?



Also also, Paul Theroux is funny as hell. In a conversation with a German guy from the train to Mongolia, he relates:
"...I don't think the average American makes much distinction between Iranians and Libyans. They are seen as dangerous and worthless fanatics, so why should we waste our time on being subtle with them?"
"That's the way Americans think about us," Helmut said.
"Not really."
If he mentions the war, I thought, I'm going to say You started it.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Bear and Meta-Bear

dalek
Smartphone sees its future in the warehousing of once great beasts (pressed again a 1-way mirror on the door to the storeroom at the LSU Museum of Natural History)

bear
Bear and Meta-Bear engage the intruder.

owl
Owl is started by and yet all too familiar with what's to come.

Happy Friday!

I could live on Roosevelt Island and ride the sky tram



I could live on Roosevelt Island and ride the sky tram into Manhattan every day. It might get old, though can't imagine ever stepping onto a sky tram with that kind of view and sighing, Ugh, not this again. Fucking sky tram.

Thursday:
Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Pressure Cooker
The Modern Lovers, The Modern Lovers
Rocket from the Tombs, Barfly and The Day the Earth Met Rocket from the Tombs
Mclusky, Mclusky Do Dallas
Art Brut, Brilliant! Tragic!
The Bent Moustache, Forst

Friday:
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Micachu and the Shapes, Never
Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer

From here
The Queesboro Bridge stretches over Roosevelt Island and there used to be a elevator that would take passengers and cars from the bridge down to the island. Now that is a way to arrive, via bridge elevator.

This whole Roosevelt Island fantasy was spawned by a passage in terrible, riveting Just Kids where Patti and Robert go out to the ruins of the mental hospital on Welfare Island, as it was originally called, and abscond with a fetus in a glass jar because they are young and artists and fascinated by and are going to make art and poetry out of things all the time, ALL THE TIME, and then Robert drops is on the sidewalk just outside their apartment and it shatters on the street. Smooth move, Robert Mapplethorpe! I bet that was a fascinating mess to clean up on the sidewalk. Patti says he sent her upstairs so he could clean up fifty-year-old pickled fetus mess, but you know he just looked around and whistled to himself doo-de-doo and kicked that mess into at the nearest storm drain.



Edison surveys the place in 1903 when it was Blackwell's Island, before it was Welfare Island, before it was Roosevelt Island.


View Larger Map

I walked around it in Google Maps last night. Looks nice. They have a Starbucks and a Duane Reade. And New York City handy. By sky tram.



Maybe I could ride in with Eleanor Friedberger every day and we'd be transit friends. She seems a little like Patti Smith but more chill, as Roosevelt Island is to the rest of the city.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

version of alright


"A fairly stupid thing..."

Monday:
Pierre Moerlen's Gong, Time is the Key
National Health, National Health
The Wilde Flowers, The Wilde Flowers
The Deviants, Ptooff!
Various Artists, Root Damage
Greg Ashley, Medicine Fuck Dream
Charlie Megira, Rock-N-Roll Fragments

Tuesday:

Wednesday:
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
Lou Reed, Sally Can't Dance
Pink Fairies, Live at the Roundhouse
Twink & the Fairies, Do It
Antony & the Johnsons, I Am A Bird Now
Nico, Chelsea Girl
Gerry Rafferty, City to City




1969: Patti Smith, photographed in New York by Norman Seeff
http://www.1972projects.blogspot.com
I like Sally Can't Dance even though you are not supposed to. It's a silly declaration to make, but among Lou Reed People, you are really not supposed to like it.  It's alright. It's a version of alright.


Just Kids reminds me of Memoirs of a Geisha, a reiteration of "At that moment I knew everything would be different..." at everything. From a quantum perspective, she's right, but c'mon. There is a point where things just happen. Still, it's engaging, come hither and ghost skinny like Patti Smith was in 1969.  You can't say no to that Patti Smith. Look over there and say "no."


Child of God is, so far, as funny as a harrowing incest Western Southern can be. In fact, just now I was mixing up details of it with those in Faulkner's Sanctuary, and that is making me which the authors/books were switched. Or they were one book or something.

My night writing class is coming to a close, and the two guys in it have done a great job. Things are gearing up for the fall semester at work. I went to my first guitar class in a month and did all right, if squeaky rustiness is a version of alright.  I feel like a version of alright. I feel like Nico mooing along with her string section and it works in its way. I feel like whoever  actually plays on "NY Stars" that hits the right reverby note against Lou Reed's dispassionate recitation and its the kind of vibration that looses a moon free from its planet's orbit. None of it is all great; but parts of it are right on the money.

I like how Cormac McCarthy describes "swales in the broomstraw" in Line Goddamn Two of Child of God and you are all, OH NO, WRITER IN THE HOUSE.  And then later, at a funeral, he was all
They buried her up at Sixmile and the preacher he said a few words fore they thrower dirt over her and old Gresham stood up, had his hat in his hand and all. Stood up and sung the chickenshit blues. The chickenshit blues. No, I don't know the words to it but he did and he sang em ever fore he sat back down again.
And what do you do with "the chickenshit blues"? It is so stupid a phrase, a plastic grocery bag blowing up against those swales of broomstraw, flapping and cracking in the sharp wind but indelibly stuck there in the weeds. One of the things that got to me about living in Kansas City was the wind. Every fenceline had a fine line of garbage at it, like caulk pressed into a seal. Yet, I don't know if I know what swales of broomstraw looks like whereas I know precisely what the chickenshit blues looks like.

Seeing it there in its own little sentence loosens it, frees it from the world. I think that's the idea behind  funerals.  In guitar class, Dave keeps going to questions and answers as how a melody works and how sometimes the best musical thing to do is to not play a note at all. We played two versions of the theme from The Jeffersons in honor of crazy old Sherman Hemsley's passing, a gospel version in F and a hillbilly stomp version in E and while I liked the hillbilly version better + it was easier to play, the ending came out cleaner in the gospel version. Everybody around me has fallen asleep including the dog.  I'm gonna read a little of this book and do the same.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

plate of shrimp

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This is not a plate of shrimp, or chicken, but a plate of brisket from Frank's. I did think about getting shrimp for a second, so it is still connected to the following.


Friday:
Shintaro Sakamoto, How To Live With a Phantom
Jimmy Cliff, Rebirth
Public Image Ltd., This is What You Want... This is What You Get
Ministry, The Land of Rape and Honey
Butthole Surfers, Hairway to Steven
Slowdive, Souvlaki
Galaxie 500, Today
Felt, The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories

Saturday:
David Crosby, If I Could Only Remember My Name
The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Gilded Palace of Sin

Sunday:
Patti Smith, Just Kids
This thing on NPR about prepared guitarist Janet Feder
Six Organs of Admittance, For Octavio Paz
Sir Richard Bishop, While My Guitar Violently Bleeds

When I was a DJ at KLSU twenty-five years ago, the station's copy of Tom Waits' Rain Dogs had a skip in "Gun Street Girl" where it would go "Shadow fixed the toilet with an old trombone with an old trombone with an old trombone...." and it was the best skip ever. I would play it in the background while I was talking, afraid that it would unskip itself just when I was getting in the groove.



Twenty-five years later, my high school is having their twenty-fifth reunion but I didn't go. Not that I dislike those people or anything, but just didn't.

About twenty-five minutes ago I fixed the toilet. Not with an old trombone but with stuff from Home Depot.

On the way back from Home Depot, we popped into Whole Foods and the young woman at the register asked "Don't you work at KLSU?" which I do - my job is with the department in which KLSU is a part - but it still knocked me back a loop.  I've been thinking about that Rain Dogs loop since my bro Joe Bonomo asked about great records skips of our youth on Facebook and then the toilet broke and so on and I just wanted this weekend to get back on its groove.

I had to skip Super Chikan at Teddy's Juke Joint last night because that's when the toilet presented its brokenness, and I got a roasted chicken at Whole Foods. Coincidence? I bet they had chicken at the reunion. I bet at least one person was at that reunion with whom I watched our collective bootlegged VHS copy of Repo Man over and over and could, in a flash of years, drop right into the "plate of shrimp" scene.



It would probably look a lot like this reenactment. I bet they had shrimp at the reunion. They did at the last one. Like, really good shrimp. Time is nothing but shadows, dude. You guessed it. Time machine. Cue the trombones.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Lafayette Cemetery No. 1

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New Orleans' Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. - This was our guide to 1, Dr. Bill, explaining how as a young soldier, P. G. T. Beauregard helped design the Confederate battle flag and how, as a general, he ordered the attack on Ft. Sumter under that flag. This was not, however, Gen. Beauregard's tomb.

Dr. Bill also said things like, "War of 1812? Who cares. The most important thing in the 1810's? Steamboats." I like the way he thinks.


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I love the Save Our Cemeteries tours, because they are explicitly not corny. They suffer no voodoo foolishness and speak in calm tones befitting walking a city of the dead.

Cue my favorite song of 1987.

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Pretty Betty.

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This "no cross, no crown" engraving was my favorite. There is your prosperity evangelism bumper sticker campaign should you need one. The most notable resident of this particular crypt is

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Hon. John Howard Ferguson of the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. His counterpart in this landmark suit, Homer Plessy, is interred at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 across town.

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When you live here, you are around these cemeteries all the time, so much so that you don't even see them. Corny as this sounds, it is worth the time it takes to actually see them and even know what you are talking about.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

more chicken blues

audubon13

Chicken and red beans from Fiorella's.

Tuesday:
Richard "Dickie" Landry's interview on ABC Australia's The Daily Planet
JEFF the Brotherhood, Hypnotic Nights
Sleater-Kinney, The Woods
Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden
The Fleshtones, Blast Off!
Sonic Youth, Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star
Blue Öyster Cult, Cultösaurus Erectus and Secret Treaties


Wednesday:
Super Chikan, What You See
Lazy Lester, You Better Listen
Little Freddie King, You Don't Know What I Know
R.L. Burnside & the Sound Machine, Bad Luck City


Thursday:
Mark Pollizzotti, Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited
Bob Dylan. Highway 61 Revisited
Bob Dylan, Live 1966 "The Royal Albert Hall Concert"
Eddie Harris, Silver Cycles
Donald Byrd, Free Form
Joe Bataan, Riot!
Little Beaver, Party Down
Young-Holt Unlimited, Mellow Dreamin'


On Wednesday I listened to a bunch of blues songs about chicken and I got the more chicken blues. Incurable except for the application of more chicken.

LOCALS: Super Chikan is playing out at Teddy's Juke Joint this Saturday. Let's do this thing.

On Thursday I was sitting in  tire repair shop right off Highway 61, reading a book about Highway 61 Revisited, and hoping "Like a Rolling Stone" wouldn't come on the radio, or it would be too much. Like I'd have to do the math to see if 61 x 61 x 61 = something scary. Number of the Beast, or of some beast. 226981. I don't think there is anything too mystic about that.

Monday, July 16, 2012

scenes from the high life

audubon01
Here's where I was.

Monday:
Alex Ross, Listen to This
Mission of Burma, Unsound
Black Francis, The Golem
Yes, Tales from Topographic Oceans
Ned Rorem, Nine Episodes for Four Players/Dances/Spring Music

audubon15
I WAS HERE at Beckham's Books where I picked
up the Alex Ross book and was delighted
to see my book in there as well. I signed them like
I am somebody
I picked up a copy of Alex Ross' already excellent second book Listen to This (his The Rest is Noise is the best book ever written about music.) while in New Orleans this weekend and am trying to trace the progression from Mission of Burma to the Eroica Symphony but I didn't make its quite there.  Mr. Ross does I attempted the reverse of what Mr. Ross does so well in the opening piece, his all-"classical" post-adolescence sliding into slumming it with the college radio punks. There are music writers whose stuff I admire and emulate even, but his is the kind of stuff I wish I knew how to do. History and context and anecdote and love and disdain and he makes you hear the music. I'll get there one day.

(Edited to add: Perhaps copy editing is his secret.)

------

It should be stated that the new Mission of Burma, about which nobody is talking - are we finally over our post-punk nostalgia thing? - is a gleaming orb of righteous rickety racket, telegraphing over the lines like an urgent message from your youth, a message of "KEEP GOING STOP KEEP GOING STOP".



I'm working on the story about the Audubon Cottages for the August issue of Country Roads so I won't say much more than I'm worn out from being so relaxed. Re-entry to my less pampered workaday, though, has left me even more appreciative for what I've got. My wife and daughter are aces; I can't imagine better people to roll with. That said, below you shall find scenes from the high life.



Among these depictions of excess you will find

audubon02

this shot of the second line for Uncle Lionel as it made its way toward us.  The way New Orleans publicly experiences the passing of one of its own is as outsize and peculiar as the way it celebrates itself. There is a discussion brewing about this on my friend Alex Rawls' My Spilt Milk blog. It struck me that the public outcry for someone that likely a lot of the participants do not know personally is not unlike how Facebook sometimes becomes a parade of RIP's. It is sweet and maybe a little morbid and maybe that morbidity makes it a little sweeter, a little more revealing about how loose the threads between us might be when the weave is exposed.  I don't know.

In that vein, RIP Kitty Wells. The closest I ever got to Kitty Wells was repeatedly almost buying a concert poster in an antique store I used to visit near our loft on Kansas City. You retrace your steps a lot with a stroller baby in the Midwestern winter and notice all the little details on your route and I think about that time of my life every time Kitty Wells' name is mentioned. 92 years old, y'all. Maybe God did make honky tonk angels, or maybe the someone else just made them built to last.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

wizardry of the dead



Thursday morning:
Jerry Garcia, David Grisman and Tony Rice, The Pizza Tapes
The Grateful Dead, Fillmore West 1969
Bukka White, Sky Songs
Ben Prestage, Live at Pineapple Willy's
John Lee Hooker, Low Down Midnite Boogie

I can go either way on Grateful Dead. Sometimes they are perfect (the way everything is perfect at some point; broken click, twice-a-day style) and most of the other time, they are markedly less than. Loving them unconditionally bespeaks a deafness to the actual music being put out; hating them categorically is some tired party-line regurgitation. It's like the people that despise the Eagles because the Big Lebowski told them to; I doubt the steadiness of your conviction. Both the Eagles and Grateful Dead are neither great or horrible enough to merit such polarization. Honestly, I think the Eagles are a better band  per se:  more adept at putting a song together, making a dent on the pop consciousness, etc. I'd still rather listen to the Dead.

The way Lee Hazelwood's "Morning Dew" turns into Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe" without you really realizing it on the Fillmore West 1969 album is brilliantly banal. It's like a magician turning Cream of Wheat into oatmeal right before your eyes! They turned something familiar and likable into something more familiar and universally beloved. Such is the wizardy of the dead.


Tell me you listened to this and though, "Hmmmm. there is something missing."

Their sleepy stagger through Slim Harpo's "I'm a King Bee" - the anthem of Baton Rouge blues history - has a curious alchemy except like where the Dead always blows it. The singing. "King Bee: is more about the echo than the sound. And their version is at least four minutes too long. There's only three minutes of ideas in "King Bee", great ideas they may be.


Here is how you drag out a blues song to an epic timeframe. Also here is how you select a truly disturbing frame for your YouTube preview.

The fact that there are nearly thirty volumes of Dick's Picks leads me to doubt the precision with which Dick is doing the picking. The Dead are a prime example of America's disdain for curation. We like what we like forever.





The Pizza Tapes, though, that is the stuff. The informality of how this gearlock of important hippie blowhards come together with breeze effortlessness, it's backstory that a pizza delivery guy realized "Oh shit, that's Jerry Garcia!" and stole the tape off his kitchen counter, everything. I bet no one ever thought that when delivering the Eagles a pizza.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

circle the Dairy Queen

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This piece by Luiza Restrupo was up with a bunch of similar work in a hallway display case at the LSU art school. I'm into it.

Tuesday:
Showarama Hot Trio, Showarama Hot Trio
Django Reinhardt, Fantasie
The Bad Plus, Never Stop
Masada String Trio, Azazel, Book of Angels Vol. 2
Tom Waits, Heartattack and Vine and Blue Valentine
Carney, Hild & Kramer, Black Power

Wednesday:
The Killers doing Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" (via NOWNESS)
Fleetwood Mac, Mr. Wonderful and The Pious Bird of Good Omen
Gene Vincent, Born to Be a Rolling Stone and Rockabilly Rebel
Tony Joe White, Homemade Ice Cream
Jerry Douglas, Everything is Gonna Work Out Fine
Showarama Hot Trio, Showarama Hot Trio


Nathan Martin, the dude behind the Room 220 literary news site and reading series in New Orleans, gave my book Louisiana Saturday Night a very thorough and thoughtful review on shiny, revamped Oxford American website.

Reviews of my own work and my relationship with the magazine notwithstanding, The OA has stepped up their game as far as digital content goes. It's worth a look; they might just figure out how to do this online media thing.

Speaking of digital, the book is available for both Nook and Kindle as well as a paperback version suitable for the mesh map pocket on the back of the passenger seat. Or, that shelf in the back window; Frank McMains' stunning cover shot will look great through the back window of your car in the gravel parking lot of a swamp bar.

I'm writing something about the Showarama Hot Trio, a gypsy jazz situation from New Orleans, and I feel I had to start with them, circle out for two days and get back to them to know how to write about it.  In that circling, I listened some Tony Joe White.


Tony Joe White, "Saturday Night in Oak Grove, Louisiana"

which, among other things, involves "going to town to circle the Dairy Queen to see who's hang in' out." I love how Tony Joe is a man out of time, that digital technology doesn't quite now how to process that baritone and the humid, muddy production on his album Homemade Ice Cream. The vinyl fetishists of the world might go "See? See?!" to the no one listening to their records with them, and they might be right on this one, though I like to think this case is due less to vinyl > digital than it is to Tony Joe White > The Future.

I've also been watching webinars on how to use our new content management system and it is as sexy as it sounds. I have a couch and a projector in my office, but somehow even that casual an environ cannot make one cozy with a webinar.  And thing is, these are actually good webinars, like they get their information across and are organized well in case one does need to circle back and the speaker speaks clearly and everything. But still.

Monday, July 9, 2012

The setup

teddys

The setup: pint of Jack or Crown, can of Coke, bowl of ice, however many glasses. Adjust mix for effect and sip at your own pace. Send someone from the table to get more ice eventually. I'm not a Jack and Coke guy, but I love a Jack and Coke setup when I go to Teddy's. It's brilliant move and a bad idea wrapped up in one. This picture looks like product placement but I'd say the place overshadows the product and whatever it originally meant.

Saturday Night:
Larry Garner at Teddy's Juke Joint. Happy 60th birthday, Larry. Those ribs were on the money. Give ol' Larry some birthday love and get his new CD Blues for Sale on iTunes or Amazon or just go find him. I bet he'll sell you one.

Sunday:
Lil' Band O' Gold, The Promised Land

Monday:
Nurse with Wound, She and Me Fall Together in Free Death
Scientist, Scientist Dubs Culture into a Parallel Universe
Otis Taylor, Clovis People, Vol. 3
Boredoms, Vision Creation Newsun
Leo Kottke, Guitar Music
Bill Frisell, Disfarmer

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A setup of a wholly different sort. It'll set you up nonetheless. I think it would be hilarious if you ordered a setup and this is what they brought you and were all, "What?"


Saturday, July 7, 2012

significant readings

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Ghost hunting at the Myrtles. We saw orbs.

Saturday:
XTC, Skylarking
The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Spacegirl and Other Favourites
Black Mountain, Black Mountain
Stevie Jackson, (I Can't Get No) Stevie Jackson
Vladimir Ussachevsky, Electronic and Acoustic Works 1957-1972
Marc Bolan, Genesis
Rose Tattoo, Rose Tattoo
Lil' Band O' Gold, The Promised Land

Friday, July 6, 2012

Let's review some records!

IMG_4807

Monday:
It's dark outside. Let's review some records that have been sitting on my office windowsill for ages!

John Yao Quintet, In the Now Thuddy-drummed jazz. Merry-go-round horns like in some of those woolier Mingus records swooping in and then darting away, a knifepoint of Hammond organ here and there all chopping up the negative space left by that bass drum.

Ergo, Multitude, Solitude This was on an actual CD and had to stop for a second to think how to play one. It was like not knowing which side of the car the fuel tank is on with CD's on the iMac. Also, I think this CD was still in the stack from my old office, and maybe the office before. Sorry, Ergo. This wave of neglect is not because I don't dig your slow gravity orbit around the smoldering remains of mood jazz, or the static-fuzzy, electronica-infused way you transmit your data back to the home world, or the graceful tumble through space that is how you manifest said orbit. It's that I am lazy with CD's.

Build, Place I know I've listened to this, for I love this group; a quintet or so of smarty-pants, new-composition composing, New York music school types playing each others pieces (these all by member Matthew McBane) like, you know, a band does. I love this idea and the results, which is a rare balance in idea/results negotiations. They (all these composers, actually) lean toward a nervous kind of elation, a Philip Glassy-eyed wonder that perhaps hints at desires to be doing musical theatre or bar jazz. They are, however, doing this because this is what they really want to do. Urgent and precise, like emergency surgery performed on the subway as it rolls past the stop for the Met.


Dirty Projectors, Swing Low Magellan (Streaming at the NYTimes) I just pitched a review of this to someone and they caught it. Idea, meet results!








Thursday, July 5, 2012

I forgot to take pictures of the fireworks

july4-01

I did get to shoot off all the fireworks, once the feast (plated above) reached its completion. Grilled shrimp and bacon-wrapped scallops on grilled polenta, steak and fried green tomatoes with homemade roulade. Thanks to my bro- and sis-in-law Tony and Peg for putting us up in their lovely home and feeding us and letting us lounge in their pool and assigning me to me blow up a bunch of cool shit with Maya and her cousins in the driveway. It looked like fireworks.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Memphis for just a minute.

memphis05

We were in Memphis for just a minute, but managed to get in the Peabody ducks, Gus's chicken, and snuck into the ballpark, capping it off with some hotel swimming in the evening glow of the pyramid. Don't sweat it, we'll be back.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

The moon over the Moonlight

waynetoups1
Wayne Toups and ZyDeCajun

Friday:

Listen to more Sun Ra & His Arkestra at Wolfgang's Vault.


The July Issue of Country Roads Magazine is making the rounds and I am all up in it with
Saturday:

I went to check out Wayne Toups (top) and the Moonlight Inn (below) for that very magazine. 

moonlight

The Moonlight Inn in French Settlement.

moon outside the moonlight inn

The moon over the Moonlight. It's amazing how much better one's photos are when remembers to bring a tripod. I don't want to give away too much - article forthcoming in August - but dude, they party out there in the sticks.

mom's bar

I stopped outside this place, Mom's Bar, on the way back. It looks to be straight out of True Blood, down to the dated hard rock booming through the walls. There were just two dudes there shooting pool and I decided to forgo a visit, just in case vampires are real. The running theme of Cajun Justice, a reality cop show based in Terrebonne Parish where I grew up, is all about the Sheriff tracking down voodoo gangs.  So disappointing. I just want to see someone from my high school either be a cop on TV or be arrested on TV, OK? Is that too much to ask? I never saw a voodoo anything ever, and I had goth tendencies in my formative years. What I'm saying is, maybe I know what goes on in the night down here, having written a book on it, and maybe I don't. Or maybe TV isn't like life at all!