Alex V. Cook

sandwiches

2012-02-02T14:02:00.001-06:00

This excellent double portrait of Mr. Foster sits above the reception desk of the Guaranty Life Insurance Building, which also houses a number of Baton Rouge's radio stations. I was there recording a segment of the Bite and Booze show on 107.3, airing this Saturday. Tune in! We talk about sandwiches!

Wednesday:
Destroy All Monsters, Bored
Godz, 2

R.I.P. Don Cornelius
R.I.P. Mike Kelley
R.I.P. Dorothea Tanning
(image right: Dorothea Tanning, To The Rescue, 1965, Oil on canvas. From the Hood Museum.)

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Thursday:
Elton John, Madmen Across the Water
Travis Matte & the Zydeco Kingpins, Booty Zydeco
Long John Baldry, Everything Stops for Tea
John Paul Keith, The Man Who Time Forgot
Dr. Feelgood, BBC in Concert (14th January 1975)
Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Wolfroy Goes to Town
I Can Lick Any Sonfoabitch in the House, Live in Seattle

Louisiana Saturday Night is happening! It's available for pre-order from LSU Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, I've been assured Kindle/eBook formats will be available when the book hits stores in March. Events are being scheduled, talks organized, the keystone is being loosened for the publicity avalanche.

I set up a page on this blog to collect everything as well as one at LouisianaSaturdayNight.com. The full social media octopus for the book has yet to be summoned from its dark underwater lair.

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Edited to add: I once knew a kid everyone at school called "Sandwiches" because he brought extra sandwiches in his lunch. I can never look at the word "sandwiches" without thinking of that kid.

my opinion on Lana Del Rey is valuable

2012-01-31T15:50:00.000-06:00

Lana Del Rey, "National Anthem"

Heartless Bastards, Arrow (streaming at NPR)
Lana Del Rey, Born to Die
Ornette Coleman, The Complete Science Fiction Sessions

I'm not sure what the big fuss is about. Lana Del Rey is just weird enough to work for me. Her voice has a hairbrush-microphone-sing-in-the-mirror quality I admire. The lyrics are occasionally goofy enough that it sounds like an actual person made them up. I like the Nelson Riddle via Casio-preset production. It's like cinematic romantic anthems for people who are marginally successful at having relationships, songs to be belted out in the microwave dinner minutes. I dunno; it's not thoroughly insipid. Is that what's wrong with it?

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We had four fire alarms in a row this afternoon , and each time we filed outside dutifully, complaining about the work we weren't getting done by the fourth iteration. Ours is an echoey old building decked out in tile and hardwood and marble, and the alarm is so loud in the stairwells, it is almost transcendent. Visceral. Like you will become fire if you don't leave. The fact that I like the fire alarm might determine whether my opinion on Lana Del Rey is valuable to you.

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On the note of enjoying fire alarms, happy birthday 75th birthday Philip Glass!

Here's a video of me watching Mr. Glass watch someone perform "Opening" from Glassworks at a master class here on campus in 2010.

grocery store roses

2012-01-30T16:25:00.004-06:00

We put a lava lamp in the music room to enhance the grooviness

Saturday:
Troll Hunter

Sunday:
The Rolling Stones, Aftermath
The Libertines, Up the Bracket
Edward P. Jones, The Known World

Monday:
The Monkees, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.
Louisiana Saturday Night Spotify playlist
Mount Analogue, Observations and Motion
Wye Oak, Civilian

I put together a Louisiana Saturday Night playlist of Cajun, zydeco, blues, New Orleans music and swamp pop as it appears in the book. There's a lot of stuff I want to include that isn't on Spotify, but it gets the idea across.

A giveaway for the book is to be staged through this very website, as soon as I get the details sorted.

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I had lunch at the stockyard and then watched a cattle auction, all as part of an assignment. Nothing will make your face itch more than an auctioneer babbling numbers in the $900 range. Look for the tale in the March issue of Country Roads and find out if I inadvertently bought a cow or not.

The camellias are at a full rage just out our back step. There is a wall of them separating us from the neighbors, really one of my favorite things about our house. They got in my dreams - I was in a room in my house where I saw a small blond leather version of a camellia on a long stem like grocery store roses. When I picked it up to look at it, another appeared in its place, and then every time I turned my head, there were more and more, stacked up in pules to the leather flower whorls pointed out, until they filled up the whole room.

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Used to be, if someone would ask me what kind of movies I like, I'd say I don't really like movies, but now I'll say the kind of movies I like is Troll Hunter.

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Maya is teaching me to play drums, part of a twofold plan involving 1) learning to play drums and 2) doing a parenting half-nelson to get her to practice, and she is actually really good at putting a musical idea across. Like she's patient, but not infinitely so, which is pretty much my approach to teaching. And everything.

The Known World

2012-01-27T15:41:00.000-06:00

Thursday:
Edward P. Jones, The Known World
The Swell Season, Strict Joy
Vic Chesnutt, Silver Lake

Friday:
Steve Reich, Three Tales
Jim Staley, Mumbo Jumbo

Book publicity is aswing! The one definite thing is the book launch party at Teddy's Juke Joint on March 10th. You said you'd come! I'll remind you!

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I had a dream that Sukie, the very dog you see above, was the size of a horse and just standing at the foot of the bed in the dark staring at us.

I also had a dream that I was involved in the building of the Eiffel Tower, and there was some deal with the timesheet, where you had to list every hour that work was being done on the tower, not just the hours you worked. Basically the timesheet would say you worked 16-20 hours a day, six days a week, covering the different crews. The supervisor explained this was a violation of French labor laws but was how it had to work, and that when the labor law inspector inevitably comes around, tell him that I worked all those hours, and he'll tick it off on his little list and that would be the end of it.

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The Known World is so good. It's Cormac McCarthy spare, rambly, harrowing without the gauze of privilege lending the narrator a means to disbelieve that things are as bad as they are. The people in the Known World are cautiously surprised the world isn't worse, or pragmatically try not to think about it.

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Somehow I'd yet to hear Steve Reich's Three Tales before, or this little wonder as well.

Steve Reich, "Reed Phase"

into the mists of history on a flaming raft

2012-01-25T15:05:00.001-06:00

One's circle should contain all the best people.

The Bright Light Social Hour, The Bright Light Social Hour
Battles, Dross Glop 1 (here and here)
tUnE-yArDs, W H O K I L L
We Are Augustines, Rise Ye Sunken Ships
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Black Francis, The Golem
Edward P. Jones, The Known World
Pearls Before Swine, City of Gold

Here's this:

I wish Chuck Klosterman a long life but that Tuneyards piece is some of the laziest thinking published so far this century
— The Mountain Goats (@mountain_goats) January 25, 2012

What I'll say is: W H O K I L L made it onto my "best of 2011" list, and might have made it to the top if my list had a top, and Merrill Garbus would probably whip any or all three of us in a fight if it came down to it.

I almost bailed on posting a "best of 2011" list because 1) it is lazy, 2) is arbitrary, and 3) it was January 19, 2012 when I finally got around to it, nearly three weeks since the year was sent adrift into the mists of history on a flaming raft. But I'm listening to W H O K I L L now, and it still has the stuff.

In response Mr. Klosterman's aforementioned "Tuneyards piece" about the career arcs of indie darlings: Why people love anything is anyone's guess. I do what I can just to understand why I like something when I like it because I think there is something to glean from fingering that fragile cord of interest while it still stretches from point A to B. You have to pluck it right then before the string pops. How the thing sounds in the future when all the popped strings are restrung is the future's business.

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And anyway, blessed are the determined recommenders! Thanks to J. Edward Keyes for keeping mentioning We Are Augustines! Double thanks for Jamey Hatley for mentioning Edward P. Jones in conversation this morning; I've been trying to remember his name since she mentioned it a year or so back. This Washington Post article lays out what he's about, if your curious. I hope someone out there gives The Golem a spin because it is aces. One's circle should contain all the best people, so that their recommendations spiral up like a minaret.

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The Bright Light Social Hour, "Detroit"

Me: This song is pretty good, isn't it? Maya: Yeah, it's good. Not the best though.

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Speaking of recommendations, in this week's Record Crate for 225 Magazine: Fred Eaglesmith, Punch Brothers, Kidsleep records compilation, and Bryan Adams. Fred Eaglesmith is playing tonight in Baton Rouge at the Red Dragon.

I like Bruce Springsteen

2012-01-24T14:22:00.000-06:00

"All I'm Thinkin' About"

Pulp, His 'N' Hers
Roedelius/Campanni/Bigazzi, Friendly Game
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Devils & Dust
The Chameleons UK, Strange Times
Momus, Ocky Milk
Klaus Nomi, Za Bakdaz: The Unfinished Opera
Virgin Prunes, ...If I Die, I Die

Clarification: I like Bruce Springsteen and am glad he's playing JazzFest.

I made a quip on twitter/facebook

(insert indignant comment about New Orleans jazz/heritage music in response to the Springsteen JazzFest announcement)
— Alex V. Cook (@cookalexv) January 24, 2012

making light of the spate of "no Jazz at JazzFest" quips that come up whenever the big non-New Orleans-music headliners are announced. The oblique joke fell largely flat with acquaintances spilling out on all sides to tell me I was dead wrong to not appreciate any Bruce Springsteen appearance. I do; I intend to go see him even. Geaux Boss!

It's just that social media is such a curious, obsessive mirror. When we see something in its reflection that doesn't look like us, our tendency is to correct it or excise it or blot it out, whereas in real life, we let friends and strangers say stupid things all the time without comment. Something about it being on the screen, our screen, makes us react. I'm pretty sure this is how contemporary politics and class dynamics works as well.

Bruce Springsteen is a wide wellspring of (re)discovery for me. I came of age in the late 80's where da Boss suddenly was re-animated into an all-consumptive media entity, an agent sent from Adult Contemporary America to eclipse Prince. As insouciant teenagers should do, I shunned it, leaving his entire ever-expanding catalog for me to revisit now.

For instance, until today I hadn't listened to Devils & Dust, (and I have Spotify's ticker to thank for my doing so) which is a sepia thundercloud casting a shadow on peasants and the locusts eating their crops alike, occasionally parting to let in little rays of light like "All I'm Thinkin' About" shine through.

the Japanese magnolias are doing this

2012-01-23T15:46:00.003-06:00

Magnolia liliiflora, a.k.a, Japanese Magnolia

Leonard Cohen, Old Ideas (streaming at NPR)
Alex Chilton, Free Again: The "1970" Sessions
The Mountain Goats, The Life of the World to Come
Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
Dr. Dog, Shame Shame
Marah, Let's Cut the Crap and Hook Up Later on Tonight
Camper van Beethoven, II and III
Mekons, United and Punk Rock

My friend Terry once said the most reliable sign of an untrustworthy person is an appreciation for Leonard Cohen. I'd attempt a counter-argument but Terry is long gone and thereby wins all debates and besides, who can talk about records when the Japanese magnolias are doing this outside?

the adoration of the conjurer

2012-01-22T15:05:00.001-06:00

Mountain Goat revival

Tod Goldberg, Where You Lived: Stories
Palace Music, Lost Blues and Other Songs
Brian Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
The Mountain Goats and Nurses at Tipitina's, New Orleans, LA
The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree and Heretic Pride
Alabama Shakes, Alabama Shakes
Simon Joyner, Out into the Snow
Fred Eaglesmith, The Boy that Went Away and Balin

A review of Tod Goldberg's free ebook Where You Lived: Stories (cross-posted to Goodreads)

A free ebook from Amazon, easily worth ten times the price. I hope the young lions embrace the short ebook as a platform and make it their own. This three-story set from the author of the Burn Notice series is sharp yet breezy. The second-person narrative of the opening story is effortless in how it injects you into the life of a loser teenager becoming a successful adult; it's almost as if the narrator is the childhood home the protagonist revisits, though, if that is the case, it's not glaringly so. The second story, about the twilight of a golf pro, is like Wells Tower titrated for television, but the third, a glowing tableau of jerkwater ennui, is worth a look. I have yet to delve into the extra "the story behind the story" end material, but I'm kinda thrilled it's there. It speaks to the potential of the platform and how a good story or three with dimension aren't going to be fenced in by something as flat as a page.

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John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats makes me like music a little more after hearing him/them play. Which is not an easy feat for me, since there's only a few things I like more than music, things too intimate to my heart to detail, and his/their music details those things, hence the magic and the adoration of the conjurer.

It was great, though it wasn't even the best tMG show, probably in the middle of what I've seen. JD spent a lot of time at the piano, which cool and all, but I remarked that each of those piano songs sound like there are going to turn into "Theme from 'The Greatest American Hero'" any second and they don't. My nephew Shannon said on Facebook that JD's likely got a cassette somewhere with twelve versions of that song. I defer to Shannon's insight into the Mountain Goats - he's actually been the teenager from "Dance Music" even down to literally living in those apartments in San Luis Obispo and etc.

But when JD leads the masses in a singalong of "No Children", it's like church for people like me, bitterness and sarcasm at its wittiest yet transcending itself into love. And when the girl standing in front of me broke into a full pep rally cheer routine to "This Year", it's like there's hope simmering in the world, ready to bubble over at the striking of the right note.

I'm trying to get Maya into the Mountain Goats; it seems a good fit for an adolescent who in her band interview explained that she likes to draw owls and birds of prey. I am all into Fred Eaglesmith at the moment. He's like those old country-fringe classic singer-songwriters, or rather, is one, whose albums actually rise in quality to meet those countless desperate sunsets. He's at the Red Dragon in Baton Rouge this Wednesday if you're into good music and all.

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Duck confit club at Capdeville

Thanks to Brannon for driving, and Robbi and Tim for indulging my need to try the duck confit club at Capdeville, which was smoky and funky and distinctive, befitting the excess of its makeup, but Brannon's pork cakes over cheese grits was the thing. Savory and rich and with just the right sharp tang; it was upscale church picnic good.

Our two vegetarian companions suffered their grilled cheese and marinara/soup with pluck. I took a whirl with the fried red beans and rice balls appetizer, which like the opening band for the Mountain Goats, would've been so much better if it was, you know, better, or at least prepared to fit the parameters of its aspirations. I like truth they were aiming for in the distance - a boudin ball made out of red beans and rice, two-for-one Louisiana Appetizerganza, but the facts don't bear out that truth. Really, it'd been better without the beans. They dry up in the fryer.

Fried red bean and rice balls with a green onion aioli and reduced hot sauce

They should change the wording on the menu description from "reduced hot sauce" to "hot sauce reduction". Otherwise, it sounds like "Hey! I got half-price hot sauce from Dollar Tree!" Nothing against Dollar Tree, and hot sauce is hot sauce once it's in the bottle, but it detracts from the tony, we-get-you,-young-professional vibe the place is trying to put out there - e.g. the serving staff all wear concert tees; Talking Heads and the Clash on the jukebox, playing against the otherwise semi-posh, hotel-restaurantesque decor. I like how the menus were made from the nice filing folders; the ones with the metal clips. Coveted by office jockeys everywhere.

I am chalking up this indulgence of their and your patience as preliminary research on the next big project, which will never come to fruition if I don't get that proposal done, so off I go. Cheers!

request for a Mountain Goats/Coldplay mashup

2012-01-20T09:39:00.001-06:00

I woke up with both the Mountain Goats "No Children" and Coldplay's "Clocks" in my head, perhaps soundtracking the dream I had where I was supposed to sing a song in a play with my daughter. Typical to logistical planning with a 10-year-old, she reminded me of the play the night before and had complete confidence that I had my act together, and typical to me, I'd forgotten that I signed up to sing a song and didn't know what song it was or anything. I flurried around the set before the show bothering people who'd spent months rehearsing if they had the words or even knew what song it was, but they were all busy with their parts. The ones they were prepared and qualified to perform. I wondered aloud in the dream why I was even being allowed to participate.

Subtle, brain. The generalized fear of being discovered to be a fraud is so fun. It makes for uneventful drama with a flatter ending, when it actually has one. I wish in the dream I'd decided to sing "No Children" in front of all the parents sitting uncomfortably in metal chairs in the school auditorium, or, at least brought down the house with a stirring rendition of "Clocks." One of the bands at Maya's big Black Diamond concert last December did so, stage lights in full dramatic swing, and I cried a little. It was touching, seeing band after band really lean into to these empty bubble pop songs, filling them up with their lives. But no, I fretted in my dream and woke up before I could see what happened.

So, I hereby issue this request for a Mountain Goats/Coldplay mashup of these two songs. Give my lousy dreams some meaning, lend some purpose to those brain cells flaring up in the anxious void of my subconscious. I'd do it if I was any good at that sort of thing.

I'm going to see the Mountain Goats in New Orleans this weekend. Maybe they'll hear this plea and work it out on stage.

The windup playlist (to be updated until we go)
The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee
Badly Drawn Boy, About a Boy soundtrack
The Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride
Arthur Allgood, I Have Not Seen The Wind (d/l-able from his Facebook page)
The Mountain Goats, Ghana
Fred Eaglesmith, Indiana Road
Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Beware

party time

2012-01-19T13:53:00.001-06:00

Last night, I went out and partied with these folks at the Rainbow Inn in Pierre Part, LA. The Rainbow Inn appears in a Country Roads piece this coming February and on page 121 of my book this coming March. The people from Swamp People hang out there all the time; Miss Cora (right) says she even got a speaking part this season.

Swamp pop legend Don Rich plays a regular gig there every Thursday, but is taking a break until March.

Don Rich, "Party Time"

Wednesday:
Matthew Dear, Headcage and Black City
A bunch of Clams Casino songs on YouTube (via YouTube/Google)
Shawn Lee's Incredible Tabla Band, Tabla Rock
A bunch of rare funk songs on YouTube, notably The Soulfadelic's "The Big Chase"
Lou Donaldson, Alligator Boogaloo

Thursday:
The Montesas, Wrong Side of Town
Clogging videos on YouTube
Wau Y Los Arrrghs!!!, Canten En Español

Hey! Louisiana Saturday Night tumbled up on the @LSUNews tumblr!

If that seems like a string of gibberish typos to you, it means LSU made an announcement about my book on one of their new sites. It is a humbling thing to have a respected press and subsequent giant parent organization help promote one's book. Thanks, LSU!

Louisiana Saturday Night (published by LSU Press) should be in stores early March (You can pre-order, I think) and this site will be partially, if not, significantly conscripted in the book's promotion. If any of you out there are media folks/book reviewers/book store owners/book festival organizers/people who like to fly authors out and put them up in luxury accommodations so they can talk about their own obsessive interests, please hit me up! The publicity machine is in gear.

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I got the new year off to a perfect late start by listing my favorite records of 2011 in this week's Record Crate blog for 225. Also this week in Baton Rouge: Rough 7, the Tipitina's Co-Op benefit and get your tickets for Fred Eaglesmith.

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The savvy self-publicist would post some Louisiana music to coincide with these announcements, but the following is the path I am currently walking. Or clogging. Or doing the hully gully to, or something. Whatever it is, it's party time.

Edited to add: I've never heard of the Montesas before today but I love these guys!

Damien Hirst isn't dead

2012-01-18T09:10:00.000-06:00

Some heavy-handed sarcasm from a Village Voice writer is perpetuating a rumor that Damien Hirst is dead.
Unless the SOPA/PIPA blackout is keeping any other obituaries from appearing, I believe it is safe to say Damien Hirst isn't dead. My sympathies to all those prepared to trot out their pickled shark jokes and totally riveting reasons why they hate contemporary art.

And I had such a clever obituary picture, too.

dust collection

2012-01-17T11:54:00.000-06:00

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.

rock city

2012-01-13T15:07:00.000-06:00

Would it were this was a close-up of an area marquee and not the sign at the hardware store near my house.

Rock City, Rock City
Ron Franklin, Ron Franklin
Rory Gallagher, Rory Gallagher
Baby Bee, Drop It Like a Bomb
The Seeds, The Seeds
Dash Rip Rock, Dash Rip Rock
I'm letting the music do the self-reflection for me today.

Happy Dash Rip Rock day! I suggest we paint DMZ on all neighborhood association signs in tribute!

Dash Rip Rock, "DMZ"

This is pretty much what they were like when I saw then in 1987 at the Chimes, across the street form where my office is now. Meanwhile, back in rock city...

The Seeds, "Evil Hoodoo"

Baby Bee (from my hometown of Houma), "High-Heeled Leather Boots"

Rory Gallagher, "Laundromat"

Rock City, "My Life is Right"

and for good measure...

Go see Joe's show

2012-01-12T10:58:00.001-06:00

Joseph Winterhalter, Installation view, BBAC, Birmingham, Michigan, 2010.

My old friend Joe and two other fine artists have a show titled Forms of Authority up at Prairie

(4035 Hamilton Avenue, Cincinnati OH). The reception is Jan. 14, 7-9 PM. Any of you Ohioans/Kentuckians in the range of this call and the gallery, go and raise a cup of art opening wine with Joe for me.

Wednesday:

Harris Newman, Dark Was the Night, Decorated, and Accidents with Nature and Each Other
Tetzui Akiyama, Low cloud means death
alva noto, UTP_
Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Thursday:

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, Kollaps Tradixionales and 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons
Efrim Manuel Menuck, plays "High Gospel"

I told Joe in an email "They look so clean in the photo but I suspect inspection would reveal that clean leaves a lot of traces of its own messy formation." Which is the way of formation. One of the really cool things we saw at Bunratty Castle in Ireland were a couplet sets of antlers from Irish Elk mounted on the wall of the great room. The Irish Elk notably exemplifies the neutral purpose of evolution's slog; their antlers grew to a point where their heads could no longer support them, and the beasts died out recently enough in the evolutionary timeline that they got mounted up on castle walls and turned into really stunning things like mermaid chandeliers.

Perhaps an ignominious end to such a noble beast, going from having a head too big for God's plan to allow to being scraps in some German craftsman's atelier, something about which he could muse "That'll work for the mermaid!"

The Process is just that, a process. We want to attribute a goal, a higher purpose because it impresses meaning to our triumph and suffering. It plasters bright exit arrows on our mendacity. We believe in our hearts, It'll all be worthwhile because in the end, we become this awesome mermaid in a castle!

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Joe's work embodies this, using institutional construction materials as his elk horns, (re)working them so that time is refracted through them, that the fourth dimension is just like the other three, meticulously rendered on equal footing on the canvas, which becomes a fifth dimension of sorts, another angle added to the evolutionary process. I suppose the viewing of the canvas is a sixth dimension; the writing about the viewing a seventh, and so on. If we were both high or quantum physicists right now, it would all make sense.

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The Sugar Frosted Nutsack rolls along with evolutionary recursion as the main character. It's a story about a story that absorbs each retelling of the story into the story. Picking up and losing things along the way.

Yesterday, I was working on a data process that mirrored it - get some more data, aggregate it, then get some more data and aggregate all that. All the pensive Japanese guitar music and glitchy techno I listened to while working on that report was about that. I'm to talk to Efrim from Thee Silver Mt. Zion today; their music is very much about this, a song ravaged to become a new song, about society ravaging its way into becoming a new one, only to sing another song.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion, "1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound"

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This post mirrors the Process. The story sitting right here in front of me waiting to be finished mirrors the Process. Everything does. The action begets the artifact which bears the trace of the action to give the artifact its dimension. That sounds like the kind of thing Joe or I would say to each other after that third vodka tonic back in the heady days of burgeoning alcohol problems and art talk. Except we would've brought the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence into it and then played pool. Or, like Mr. Leyner in Nutsack says about his story whose telling becomes a story whose telling...

Everything about it becomes it.

So, yeah, go see Joe's show at Prairie if you can. Should be a good one.

Nutsack made me snort

2012-01-10T16:35:00.002-06:00

Bright spot.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
Owen Pallett, Heartland
The Doors, The Soft Parade
The Books, Thought For Food
Paul Haines, Darn It!

More dreams. I had a dream last night where I was at a party Ornette Coleman was also attending and I had a chance to ask him about the 1958 incident in Baton Rouge area bar where he was beat up and his saxophone was thrown down a hill. I've never been able to nail down the particulars of where it happened - the most solid lead I've gotten is that it happened at a club called the Sans Souci across the river in Port Allen - and true-to-life, I didn't get the answer from the Mr. Coleman in my dream.

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All the Pretty Horses is really good, but you probably knew that already. You might not know (but might suspect) that Mark Leyner's The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, his first novel in fourteen years, is as electric and funny as his novels ever were. Back when I devoured them all in the 90's, they were the electricest and funniest. Nutsack made me snort so loud in the library coffee shop, the barista was forced to briefly stop telling her friend at the counter how great the food at Epcot was. There's a blurb for you!

---

Owen Pallett, "Oh, Heartland, Up Yours"

Sometimes listening to a chorus of a particular song is like relaxing in a bean-bag chair filled with pain killers.

---

I have my first-ever guitar lesson tonight. Crazy notion, I know, being taught how to do something as opposed to learning it the hard way. Imagine if that same concept had been applied to my day. Snorting in the library was the best part.

an echo of Eco

2012-01-09T10:08:00.000-06:00

Cliffs of Moher. Freak out on a windstorm day dream!

Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (link to a PDF of the opening essay)
The Rolling Stones, "Brown Sugar"
Old Crow Medicine Show, "Wagon Wheel"
David Bowie, Bowie at the Beeb
Efrim Manuel Menuck, Plays "High Gospel"
Laura Gibson, La Grande (streaming at NPR)
Herculaneam, Olives and Orchids
Kuupuu, Lumen tähden (From the Free Music Archive)

Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read only two essays in this collection. The title one speaks to the beautiful and horrific American sense of inflated reality as it manifests in its tourist spectacles, citing as examples a number of places I've been: San Simeon, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Disneyland and Disney World, and particularly the Madonna Inn, an over-the-top, theme-roomed Swiss chalet hotel in San Luis Obispo, CA where I spent my honeymoon. Eco doesn't sign off on the life-as-circus as he sees it here, but he gets why we do it, how the inflated story culled from a million facts and misunderstandings is the story we tell ourselves, the myth that we believe. Eco's prose is so evocative, you will want to drop everything and visit the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library, or at least the one that appears in the text.

Here is San Simeon aka Hearst Castle aka Xanadu from Citizen Cane

The striking aspect of the whole is not the quantity of antique pieces plundered from half of Europe, or the nonchalance with which the artificial tissue seamlessly connects fake and genuine, but rather the sense of fullness, the obsessive determination not to leave a single space that doesn't suggest something, and hence the masterpiece of bricolage, haunted by horror vacui, that is here achieved.

and here he goes into metaphoric overdrive attempting to depict the Madonna Inn:

Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn't give you an idea. Let's say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D'Annunzio's Vittoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino's Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry, Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn't right. Let's try telling about the rest rooms.

The other essay I read, "Cogito Interruptus", is largely a critique and appreciation of Marshall McLuhan, which, if you are a McLuhan nerd like me, you'll be all into, but otherwise might not grab you.

Generally, the contemporariness of the prose is astounding. I felt a bit of a stomach punch when I saw a date of 1980 on this essay while thinking how "now" his messages are, how he's the kind of writer you find yourself always trailing behind. Plus, both essays were funny. Nothing is better than a funny egghead.
(cross-posted at Goodreads)

---

Tangentially connected to this, I had a really complicated dream that involved LSD, something with which I have no direct experience, but fills the folk history of most of the art and literature I love. I was putting these supposedly laced Avery labels on my arm (Those packs of label blanks you see in a display case at Office Depot; I am currently working on some reports to be printed on them) and then it "kicked in" - blurry vision, heightened colors, vertigo problems - all the things I've heard about LSD manifesting in my already woozy dream-physics.

---

I'm working on an essay about a similarly stitched-from-fact-and-myth dream I had in Ireland, about Ireland, pecked out into my phone's notes app amid transatlantic sleepless desperation on the flight back. It involves the loose quilting of truth and hope that blankets out understanding of a place. An essay, sort of, is a waking dream concocted from a thing's reality and possibility, so the Eco essay (pointed out by my infinitely resourceful wife) came in very handy. That idea of the artificial tissue seamlessly connect[ing] fake and genuine. Now the trick is to not turn my essay into an echo of Eco and still keep up with the dream (of the dream).

---

Bowie at the Beeb, "Moonage Daydream"

The best thing I ate in Ireland

2012-01-07T15:12:00.001-06:00

The best thing I ate in Ireland was the fish pie at

The Caragh Restaurant in Killarney. We found it on Yelp. Go figure.

The fish pie consisted of a thick cream sauce with shrimp, fish, oysters and cockles (!) topped off with the ubiquitous whipped potatoes and then baked. Think a homemade seaside pot pie, and then remove any negative associations you might have with pot pies. Then, imagine you had a long day hauling nets of cockles and sea monsters out of the violent, freezing Atlantic, and this was waiting for you at the hearthside. That's what it was like.

You are never more than 100 miles from the sea pretty much wherever you go in Ireland, so the seafood is exceedingly fresh and this took the starchy, aggressive blandness I found to underscore most of what I ate there and channeled it in a positive direction. A dish like this sticks not only to your ribs but to your soul as well.

There are two balls of mashed potatoes hiding behind the broccoli on the side, should you worry not enough potatoes were involved.

This is what my sister-in-law got, simply titled "bacon and cabbage." She tried to get out of our stern waitress whether it was streaky bacon (what we think of as bacon in the U.S.) or the hammy, backstap bacon they call bacon there, or whether it was cooked together or what and the waitress stopped her short. "It's cabbage and bacon on the plate." and it was, no more and no less, and it was pretty good too. The bacon had something akin to a corned beef texture and tang to it; I wonder if it was corned bacon, which suddenly sounds like the beginnings of the best Rueben sandwich ever.

I digress; it's easy to call the food in Ireland boring, in fact the general cuisine does a lot of the legwork for you. But, these two dishes were both very homey, following the script, and were something I'd gladly eat once a week were the charming old Caragh just around the corner.

night boat to Houma

2012-01-06T09:14:00.001-06:00

Madness, "Night Boat to Cairo"

The Police, Zenyatta Mondatta
The (English) Beat, Special Beat Service
The Damned, The Chiswick Singles and Another Thing
Madness, One Step Beyond
Bad Manners, Special Brew

We took the night boat to Houma to go pick up the dog from my mom's and this excellent throwback soundtrack pulled from my Terrebonne High Class of '87 tape case saw us through the impenetrable darkness of Spur 70, a truck route illuminated only by the moon, sugar cane field fires, and the occasional glitter of a petroleum processing plant. It worked so well I'm going to queue it up again to facilitate the following remarks:

Zenyatta Mondatta has a marked skronk side I'd forgotten. Also, I could listen to a 4-hour full permutation version of "Voices Inside My Head." Does there exist a massive dub workout of the tune? Sly & Robbie did "Walking on the Moon" but it's not quite what I'm after.

The Police, "Voices Inside My Head". I like the guy's MTV-style production credits.
The (English) Beat's "Save it for Later" has always been one of my all-time favorite songs despite my previously not having a clue what Dave Wakeling is crooning in most of the verses. A lacuna, if you will.

Black air and seven seas
All rotten though, but what can you do?
I don't know how I'm meant to act
With all of you lot.

Kinda heavy for this little video, which incidentally depicts the little basement nightclub in which I will hang out should I make it to Heaven, reading French paperbacks while 1980's insouciant English babes dance with hand motions.

The (English) Beat, "Save it For Later"
Damn, the Damned were good.

The Damned, "Smash It Up"
History may cast them as clowns, but Madness was no slouch of a band. Nor was Bad Manners.

Bad Manners, "Inner London Violence" from the 1987 film Dance Craze.
I wish there was an actual night boat to Houma. The drive is a bit of a circuitous slog no matter which way you go, so it might as well be by night boat. My parent's house is right on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which I could pick up just across the river at the locks in Plaquemine, so it is possible.

Cajun Ska Cruise! It's an idea whose time has come.

circumstances

2012-01-05T16:08:00.000-06:00

The library window was doing crazy stuff while I was trying to finish my editing!

Yesterday:
Aphex Twin, Richard D. James Album
USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra, Sibelius: Pelleas and Melissande
MGMT, Congratulations (twice)

Today:
XTC, Nonsuch
MGMT, Oracular Spectacular and Congratulations (twice more)
The Flaming Lips & Yoko Ono, EP from their NYE show (streaming at Death and Taxes)
Guided By Voices, Let's Go Eat the Factory (streaming at NPR)
Bon Iver, Bon Iver

I played MGMT for Maya (10) and she shrugged, "I've heard this record before. Like a long time ago."
I wish someone'd given me a swift kick to straighten me out on MGMT. I had it in my head all this time I hated them ever so much. I wonder who I really hated and misdirected it onto them. To think, there's a perfectly hate-able band that I've not despised all this time.
I turned in my final proof corrections and the index, like just now. It was like folding a paper boat and sending it downstream and watching it bob and weave and suddenly realize, hmm, that was some rather important paper you just made that boat out of.
I'm going to go see Gregg Allman tomorrow night. I also just looked up the word "lacuna" after seeing it on Twitter and realizing I didn't really know what it means. If I knew what more words meant, I could probably connect the dots between the two.
If you were watching ESPNU at around 4PM CST yesterday and were thinking, man, the enormous head of that incredibly handsome man is taking up the shot in this great little clip about LSU's Digital Media Initiative, that handsome man would be me. I understand that is a very specific set of circumstances, so for those of you outside that demographic, it will be on again Jan. 21.

Ireland was great

2012-01-03T10:08:00.000-06:00

Mural on a victualler shop in Galway

Radiohead, "The Daily Mail" & "Staircase"
Neu!, Neu '75
Jody Redhage, Of Minutiae and Memory
Simple Minds, Empire and Dance
MGMT, Congratulations
Sparks, No. 1 in Heaven
10cc, 10cc
Jimmy Cliff, Wonderful World, Beautiful People
Various artists, Trojan Dub

Ireland was great.
Instead of making any New Year's resolutions, I listened to Neu! '75. More inspirational.

I only identified one error in the final proof of my book. This is either a really great sign or a terrible one. I'm gambling on the former.
There is a larger essay forming out of the Ireland trip, in case you were worried. In the mean time, I will be wearing the sweet Guinness golf hat I got at the Bunratty Castle gift shop, which might be better than the final essay.

It's cold in Galway. Also, I look like I've subsisted on black puddings and Guinnesses for longer than just a week.
I noticed my blog stats didn't waver at all during the week when I didn't post anything. In fact it was a pretty good week, traffic-wise. That again is one sign or another. I had a weak resolution rolling around that I was going to stop listing every album I listened to and book I read, stop the five-bullet point rule, adopt a less talk/more rock attitude and address the general vs. specific issues in my writing here and elsewhere, but now at my desk, my fingers automatically did their thing.

Meanwhile, back at HQ, pelicans!

Happy new year!

2011-12-31T15:29:00.001-06:00

Double rainbow over Kilkenny, Ireland. I've been putting up pics on the FaceBook if you wanna follow along.

2011 was OK 'n'all, but 2012 is gonna happen! Less talk, more rock! I'm resolved! Happy new year!

go, ho ho

2011-12-22T10:44:00.000-06:00

Loathe I may be to introduce another cat picture to the Internet, Here is Sukie contemplating what trials face her at Grandma's while we are on vacation.

Yule log from Ambrosia, photo by Jerri Jensen. The meringue mushrooms are painted with chocolate underneath the cap to create the shadow. So much cake and buttercream that you kinda have to lean in to get your fork through it.

Thursday:
John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun
Nicholas Jaar, Space is Only Noise
Timber Timbre, Creep on Creepin' On
The Dirk Hartung Combo, Drained Wait
John Cale, Circus Live
Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Rhizoma

Friday:
David Bowie, Tonight and Let's Dance
Jack Oblivian, Rat City

We busted out the yule log, put on Rat City and had a rock 'n' roll, mac 'n' cheese, chocolate cake party with Sammy and Junebug from down the street. It seems that being able to make the previous statement is a sign of living the good life.

I toyed with how badly I could get away with signing off on the proof of my book when I found on small but, to a very small but vocal audience, critical change that needed to be made, so here we go, ho ho. It's OK because I like the thing better with each re-read, which is a gift unto itself.

Saturday:
Star Trek: Generations
Independence Day

Here is the landscape upon which we grazed this Christmas Eve. I had this thought: is the reason we all are so into Christmas this year (doesn't it seem so?) because of a nascent fear that in Incan calendar end times deal is true? Like its the last Christmas? I've watched two terrible movies on cable today, weirdly both featuring Brent Spiner, and had another thought - Why has no one made an end-of-the-world Christmas movie? Melancholia meets Armageddon meets Miracle on 34th Street. Maybe I have a new project for the new year. Happy holidays, everybody!

mama fried chicken

2011-12-21T11:16:00.000-06:00

2011 is burning down to an ash, just how I like it.

Mem Shannon, A Cab Driver's Blues
Shrimp City Slim, I Work Nights
Carol Fran and Clarence Holliman, It's About Time

Happy birthday, Mem Shannon!

"I keep telling everybody, you know, po-boy sandwiches don't taste like they used to taste."
"No, you right."
"I don't know if it was the mayonnaise they were using or what."
"It's because we'd eat one of them every now and then, then."
"Yeah, it was special."
"I remember when I was a youngster, and I'm 71 now, when my mama fried chicken, that was a special supper. Now, chicken, it's common."

- Dialogue snippet from Mem Shannon's "5th Ward Horseman" from A Cab Driver's Blues, maybe the best Louisiana blues album there is, alternating between tasty, anecdotal funky blues and actual New Orleans taxi cab confessions. Check out "$17.00 Brunette". Doctors and lawyers don't tip for shit.
Also, happy birthday to my mother-in-law Frances sitting on a porch somewhere up in the hereafter, tapping her foot. One of the first times I met her, she fried up some chicken in a little electric skillet. So good, it's about ruined me for fried chicken ever since.

My annual list of the five most intriguing Baton Rouge CD's of 2011 is up in this week's Record Crate blog for 225. Read em' and weep. Or cheer, or tear at your flesh, or whatever reaction lists like these bring out in you.
Some of you better get busy proofing your books, you.
I am such a short timer for this year. In four days we embark on an Emerald Isle trip that will hopefully be accompanied by spotty wireless so that I may enjoy moments just for themselves for a bit, refocus my lens a little. I am excited about the whole itinerary but realized that I will get to watch the season two premiere of Sherlock on actual BBC One which lit a match around an already combustible tableau.

but look at what you're missing

2011-12-20T14:23:00.000-06:00

Missing nothing from Christmas buffet at work

John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun
Robyn Hitchcock, Tromsø, Kaptein
Common, The Dreamer/The Believer (streaming at AOL)
Robert Wyatt, Drury Lane
Arthur Russell, World of Echo

This snippet of dialog from A Moment in the Sun might be the best thing I've read all year.

“I been thinkin bout peach pie,” says Wilbert.
“Aint none on that wagon.”
“Man needs a dream.”
“Not me."

I think it sums everything up. The whole human condition.
Maya Angelou is surprised at the language surrounding her reading included on "The Dreamer" from the new Common album, though it must be said that she completely owns the track (starting at the 4:40 mark).

Common featuring Maya Angelou, "The Dreamer"
My wife came across this bit from Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality about the Madonna Inn of San Luis Obispo, CA. We spent our honeymoon in the "Rock Bottom" room - each has its own theme - and still talk about the strawberry champagne wedding cake obtained from their in-house Swiss bakery. We had a steak in here:

Anyway, Umberto Eco nails the place by describing as follows:

Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli.
Joe Bonomo pointed to this story about M. Henry Jones, an artist in the East Village who has been for decades pursuing the perfection of an arcane form of 3-D photography, who is being forced to move to a new studio because of rent prices. The landlord, for what it's worth, comes off like he's really helping the guy out as much as possible.
It brought up Mr. Jones connections to the New York underground film scene, one of the greatest microperiods of art history (Jonas Mekas' ecstatic compendium Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 is the best book on the subject) , and this old post about Harry Smith's films and the tedious and luck-of-the-draw manner by which knowledge was once obtained and now, just from clicking around, emerges a film by another of that scene that I've read about but never seen.

Bruce Baillie, Mass for the Dakota Sioux, parts 1 and 2
and over on Facebook I see that my friend Dickie Landry is going to be doing a solo saxophone concert in the Guggenheim rotunda in March and then I glance over at Spotify and see the profile of someone who's recently passed away, and like this post, it's all too much, it's a buffet table with too many hands in the food, and I have friends that proudly opt out of the din of social media or the Internet in general which, whatever, they seem to do just fine, but I want to pull them over and say but look at what you're missing.

the kids are alright

2011-12-19T11:47:00.001-06:00

Maya: coolest kid.

Saturday:

My daughter's band Black Diamond, "And Run", "Let it Be" and band interview at the Manship Theatre.

I could not be prouder, they sounded and looked great. Thanks to Doug Gay for the great work he does over at Baton Rouge Music Studios. Send your kids over there instead of wasting everyone's time with whatever you have them doing! You get a lightshow like that at a soccer tournament?

Sunday:

Gregg Ginn & the Royal We at a house party in Baton Rouge. Former Black Flag guitarist/SST label honcho Greg Ginn played guitar, laptop and theremin, occassionally accompanying Kim Vodicka's spoken word.

I am by nature led to make smartass comments about the one man laptop/guitar/Theremin act of Greg Ginn & the Royal We - "one inch nail" and "open mike night at a bar in Blade Runner" and "experimental music can be defined as being more fun to make than it is to listen to" among them - but once that is out of the way, it was very cool and singular and extra awesome that it was going down in a darkened smoky apartment show in Baton Rouge early on Sunday evening. It's like a Portland dream but cooler and weirder and more post-punk fulfilling. The poet in the second clip, Kim Vodicka, put on the show and I would've picked up her chapbook had the door guy ever reappeared with my change, but whatever. It would please me if there was no actual door guy and some kid just made off with my money. The kids are alright.

Monday:
The Kills, Blood Pressures
Guided By Voices, Let's Go Eat the Factory (streaming at NPR)
Atlas Sound, Parallax
Jacks, Vacant World
The Jesus and Mary Chain, Psychcandy
Love and Rockets, Earth Sun Moon

My suggestions for the new Beach Boys album

2011-12-15T10:59:00.001-06:00

Thursday:
Graham Bond Organization, Live at Klook's Kleek
Mitch Ryder, How I Spent My Vacation
Dead Boys, Young, Loud and Snotty
The Undertones, Hypnotised
The Cramps, Off the Bone

Friday:
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Flatbed Honeymoon, The Traveler
England in 1819, Alma
Shearwater, Palo Santo
The Beach Boys, Love You, Sunflower, Surf's Up
Au, Versions
Matmos, Supreme Balloon

The Beach Boys (including Brian Wilson) are reuniting for an appearance at JazzFest and a new album. My suggestion for the album is that Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips be tapped to produce it and that he be given the following:

One million dollars
One of Phil Spector's handguns
An abandoned Midwestern missile silo in which to record the album; Mr. Coyne should be given the only key
Temporary full creative control over the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and
A signed document from the mayor of Oklahoma City to Mr. Coyne mandating that he make it "the best fucking Beach Boys record ever."

Otherwise, I'm not expecting much.

The Beach Boys, "All I Wanna Do"

to peck away

2011-12-14T09:57:00.000-06:00

Painting studio lobby after the end of the semester

Wednesday:
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Silversun Pickups, Seasick
M83, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
My Morning Jacket, Circuital

Thursday:
William Gaddis, Agape Agape
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, The River

First time I read Neuromancer about 15 years ago, I was excited about the profligacy of computer networks that laid before me, and now that I taught a course in digital branding last semester, it is interesting to see how we are still catching up to Gibson's fever dream of dicey cognitive perception and dissolution of the physical self into a loosely wrought digital world. Great science fiction is like great science (and great fiction, too) in that the world it proposes is both terrifying and dazzling, impossible and very real. I'd finished the book sooner had I not read it in my iPad where I could with a few gestures leave the stream and join my own shimmering digital environment. When you check Facebook a few times during a passage where a character is jacking into different digital existences like flipping TV channels, the story starts to bleed into life.

I should add: Neuromancer is what got me into dub. The long distance space pilots are all Rastafarians who listen to dub across the vast stretches of space, which sounds alright to me.
I just executed a productive transaction via LinkedIn. I think it's the first time LinkedIn has proven to be useful. Not just for me, but maybe ever.
This song is speaking to me right now.

My Morning Jacket, "Outta My System". I'll hold on to black metal in case things get dicier.
I had an occasion recently to peck away on someone else's manual typewriter - it was at a party a poet was having and a poem was sitting there reeled up on his little desk being ruined by his guests, so I joined in and I added a line and then suddenly couldn't remember how to do a carriage return. I grew up with the things so I knew but technological adoption had pushed this minor skill to a box in the attic. I knew there was a bell when you got to the end and the speed by which you get to that bell is very satisfying, tethering the text to the paper, making the word a very real thing. I can see why poets like these things.

I feel that schism is one of the many being bridged in Agapē Agape, one endless paragraph that went on for a tidy 100 Kindle screens in which a fading Beckettian old man bounced around his walls, lamenting the passing of how you used to do things. I like the way Mr. Gaddis frequently finishes a phrase with "the" e.g., "...the only game in town, because that's what America's wait, little card falling on the, there!" It's like this thing is dying to be a poem but he's long forgotten how to do a carriage return. It's like a thought starts dying the second it hits the air, like the aliens in War of the Worlds.

One of the supplemental essays offers that Agapē Agape started as an essay on player pianos, and I can see that, but it diminishes what's going on here. It's about a million little alliterative conceits, mixing up Pushkin and pushpin, Agapē vs. Agape, pitting Plato and Philo T. Farnsworth against each other. It is hallucinatory and gibberish-y in the best way, like a hose put to your brain one last time before the tower is drained of water.
It should be added that formatting both of these reviews (x-posted from Goodreads) for this post took much longer than it would have if I'd just used a typewriter and rabbit glue. Perhaps Heraclitus is right and it all ends up in the river no matter what we do.

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, "Point Blank"

power pop language

2011-12-13T14:58:00.001-06:00

Black Diamond

William Gibson, Neuromancer
No Reservations Holiday Special
Stephen King's Bag of Bones
David Sandström Overdrive, Pigs Lose
P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake
Guided By Voices, Bee Thousand

Maya's band Black Diamond plays twice this weekend, Sat. night at the Manship Theatre and Sunday afternoon at Brew-Ha-Ha.
I just had a publicity planning meeting about Louisiana Saturday Night where we began mapping out my forthcoming omnipresence on the Louisiana music book talking circuit. If you have an event you'd like me to be at hawking my wares, let me know.
Late last night, I was reading Neuromancer with the No Reservations holiday special going on in the background, and while I'll confess getting easily lost in Gibson's classic of perceptive dissonance, it still made a lot more sense than whatever was going on with Bourdain over there on the TV. I'm guessing it was a post-modern take on the old narrative holiday special, but I dunno, more mama's cookin', less drama lookin'. Or something. The pooping Santa thing was cool until it became to a cartoon, then it lost me. Pooping Santa is interesting enough on it's own.
Also, it felt like Bag of Bones was on for hours and hours, getting more and more ridiculous, but in a great terrible TV way. At 1:43 AM, you want to look over see Pierce Brosnan lumber around pretending to cry in the rain.
I've resisted until now, but yeah, that new P.J. Harvey record is pretty special. Today, though, belongs to David Sandström Overdrive, for they are totally speaking my power pop language. I've never heard of him or them either.

David Sandström Overdrive, "Not a Good Boy Now"

minus the Univac

2011-12-09T08:46:00.001-06:00

Katie Naquin, "Orange as Hippos". Oil on canvas, on display at LSU's Middleton Library.
See more of her work at WallsCanTalkGalley.com.

Friday:
New Order, "Blue Monday" (12" Mix)
Can, Tago Mago
Various Artists, Tackhead Sound Crash Slash and Mix by Adrian Sherwood
Ruts D.C. vs. Zion Train, Rhythm Collision Vol. 1
Ghost, Opus Eponymous
Kvelertak, Kvelertak
Sleep, Jerusalem

Saturday:
Jimbo Mathus & the Tri-State Coalition at Chelsea's Cafe, Baton Rouge, LA

Sunday:
Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich

Monday:
Songs: Ohia, Axxess & Ace and The LionessPhosphorescent, Here's To Taking it EasySol Invictus, Black Europe
Henry Brant, Wesleyan Gamelan, and others, Meteor Farm
Joe Byrd & the Field Hippies, The American Metaphysical Circus
Jimbo Mathus, Knockdown South

According to the Blogger stats, we've hit 125K page views on this little blog. Thanks!
I'm not really sure how to describe Henry Brant's Meteor Farm. It sounds like a live dress rehearsal of Glee, a phalanx of beplumed native drummers, a holiday jazz band concert, and a Univac going to town on interstellar gas cloud data all happening on the same stage, each rotating through their parts like serves in volleyball, all muttering "I got it" when the ball comes back over the net. Does that help?

I just found some liner notes that pretty much line up with my description, minus the Univac. Brant's music as I understand it, is very much about sounds' position in space. I'm picturing all these groups on a massive stage with a harried stage director, clipboard in sweaty palm just trying to keep everything moving.

Whatever is going on, it has the massive the-earth-is-moving consciousness about it that I appreciate from the large-scale activities of the avant-garde composers. I suppose this is the thrill of any symphony or symphonic pop configuration, but when guys like Brant pull things apart and leave them all stretched out under the proscenium arch is when things really click in my brain. Section 12, when it all sounds like it's about to be run over by a train, is a dazzling constellation of anxiety.
Jimbo Mathus's cosmic crew might be the best bar band I've ever seen, in a meta-bar band way, or even maybe in a meta-meta-bar band that circles around to just being a great bar band and finding the material to suit (and Nudie suit) the context. I was gonna regret not shooting a video but thankfully some kind obsessive did it for me and us, one and all. My world blogs itself!

Jimbo Mathus & the Tri-State Coalition, "Tell It to the Judge"
See, if I had his band, or his position to have a similar band or at least the wherewithal to wear a Nudie suit on occasion, I'd want to do songs like this.

Joe Byrd & the Field Hippies, "Nightmare Train"
and talk about avant-garde composers between the songs, and nobody wants that. It's probably best that this is my venue.

125,000 idle blog clicks can't be wrong!

livewire voodoo

2011-12-08T12:25:00.001-06:00

Digital screen in the new plaza under construction in downtown Baton Rouge. I kinda hope it stays like this.

William Gibson, Neuromancer
Premiata Forneria Marconi, Storia Di Un Minuto
Brainticket, Celestial Ocean
John Cage, Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake
Brad Mehidau, Places
The Bad Plus, Never Stop
Ornette Coleman, The Complete Science Fictions Sessions

Brainticket is the only ticket you need.

Brainticket, "Era of Technology"
I'd like to think there are layers of techno-irony involved reading a digital copy of Neuromancer checked out from the library on the iPad while riding the bus home, but really it seems second nature to me. For Case, the protagonist in William Gibson's novel which introduced the word cyberspace in its first chapter, the pains of going back to analog attack him in his dreams.

But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach a console that wasn't there.
I don't talk about my day job much because here's why: I've been watching this data replication job fail over and over, each time for one small little glitch that happens ten minutes into the process and so you have to re start it. It's like teaching someone to ride a bike except when they fall or get scared, you have to go buy a new bike.

Oh, wait, it worked! Maybe I just needed to channel my frustrations into this screen instead of that one. Now to see if I can make the schedule work. It didn't.

Again, this is why I don't talk much about my day job.
It's screen separation anxiety. Once when my co-teacher was giving our class on the virtues of being unplugged, I basically had to sit on my hands to not check Facebook or email on my phone while he was talking.
That is one of the many things to look forward to on our week in Ireland over the holidays, where I suspect the WiFi will be as spotty as the Guinness is foamy and there are castles and leprechauns and I might be able to wander a dreamland of something besides electric sheep for a bit.

Or, because I'm like this...

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smarter

2011-12-07T09:16:00.001-06:00

More fireworks

The Roots, undun
The Gorrilaz, The Singles Collection 2001-2011
Why?, Eskimo Snow
Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer
William Brittelle, Television Landscape
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Advance Base Battery Life
Todd Reynolds, Outerborough

My favorite non-profit label New Amsterdam is having a fundraiser where each day they are allowing temporary free downloads of selected releases. Today's is two discs by the hyper-post-culture-processor William Brittelle who you should get to know. Brittelle's music is made out of all the music you like except this time it's smarter

William Brittelle, "Halcyon Days"

Give 'til it hurts, people.
The new Roots album is sorta kinda about Sufjan Stevens. I'm a fan of both, and it's a good moody record regardless of how you feel about either.
I'm kicking around the idea of a best of 2011 list even though I really didn't exactly review a lot of music this year, but when/if I do, the Eleanor Friedberger record will be on it.

Eleanor Friedberger, "Inn of the Seventh Ray"
As will be at least one thing from New Amsterdam, who by the way did not in any way solicit this announcement by doing anything but putting out cool music. I just really like what they do and how they do it.

Todd Reynolds performs "Outerborough" live at the Metro Gallery on the Contemporary Museum's Mobtown Modern Music Series. September 16, 2009. Video by Guy Werner.

Shonna Tucker has left Drive-By Truckers

2011-12-06T09:18:00.001-06:00

My favorite coffee cup, as requested by Traci Jean, the person who got us into Drive-By Truckers in the first place. Jerri's mom gave it to be because it was the one I always picked when we went out to their farm. It's from when she lived in Germany in the 70's - it has "W - GERMANY" embossed on the bottom.

Lou Reed, Legendary Hearts
The Black Keys, Brothers
Drive By Truckers, The Big To-Do
The Cars, Candy-O

Shonna Tucker has left Drive-By Truckers as their bassist and feminizing influence, and it would be incredibly tacky to suppose that the boys were all now wondering if they could, er, coax a certain churchboy-singin' guitar player back in the band now, so don't even go there. I'm embarrassed you even brought it up.

I got to go up to the green room at Tipitina's on the last night of the Dirt Beneath tour while Jason Isbell spent (I think) his last night as a Trucker loading the bus. He said, "Oh yeah, they're all up there." This was before there was any announcement about him and Shonna splitting up and his leaving the band. I thought it was weird that he was downstairs when I got up there. Patterson had done a blurb for my first book so I wanted to give him a copy, which was my in. Shonna invited me to do a shot of Jack with her and the band and I managed to not spazz out. Anyway, Shonna is a class act, and I look forward to what she's got coming up next.

Sweet Soul Cookin' with Shonna Tucker. I would watch her rub chicken grease on bass strings on a regular basis.

Drive-By Truckers, "The Fourth Night of My Drinking"

In case you've forgotten, The Big To-Do is a motherfucker of a record.

So yes. No point in beating one's breast over a band lineup change. She kept that job for eight years which is a long time, almost as long as I've had that coffee cup. Things break, go missing, you get a new vessel and fill that one up next. Cheers!

flare out across the room

2011-12-05T08:52:00.001-06:00

Slim Harpo, Live in Concert
Human Switchboard, Who's Landing in my Hangar? Anthology 1977-1984
The Quadrajets, Alabama Hip Shake
Felt, Poem of the River
The Beatles, Rob's mixtape of collected Fan Club Christmas singles
Belle and Sebastian, The BBC Sessions
Dean & Britta, The 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests

Rainy gray December with mellow English pop going on the hi-fi reminds me of sitting in the living room of my friend's apartment playing Scrabble with him and his trainwreck girlfriend. Everyone involved was in pretty sorry shape and fixing to get worse, a tragicomedy punctuated by glows that flare out across the room of memory like Christmas lights that have yet to burn out on the string.

How has Belle & Sebastian not done a Christmas record? Like a resigned, vaguely bitter one with songs about Marks & Spencer's clerks cleaning up the cafe after the final holiday rush, popping out for a drink, just one before catching the train, which turns into an awkward hungover Christmas morning. There are no trains running, the shops are all closed and both are missing the presents and feast at mum's, instead sharing the last teabag in the cupboard. There, that's a start. They can call it "Gifts of the Magi" if they like.

This brief wave of bullshit holiday melancholy is sponsored by a lingering sinus infection, pathetic fallacy, and a innate fear of success. Really, everything is gangbusters up in here. We are busting up a gang as I type this.

Rob's compiling this mix of Beatles Christmas fan club singles is an act of mesmerizing devotion. I love how the tunes get weirder as they got weirder.

The secret to Dean Wareham's particular musical genius is that he can ride the lowest wave for longer than anybody and and it never crests and suddenly picks up just a touch and you shake awake and go "I'm surfing! I'm doing it!" and you are for just a second and then you get deposited on the sand on your wetsuit, the empty beach staring right at you.

a robot's fart

2011-12-04T16:16:00.001-06:00

We went to see the Christmas lights get turned on downtown and suddenly it sounded like the parking garage was under siege. Fireworks! We scrambled to the roof to watch them explode up close and personal. The best part was how the boom echoed off the surrounding buildings, each blast dissipating into what Maya and her friend accurately described as "a robot's fart".

Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
John Fahey & His Orchestra, Of Rivers and Religion
The Incredible String Band, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and Wee Tam
Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich

I heard Incredible String Band on KLSU last night piloting the darkness one must brave to come home from Teddy's and it reminded me what having a late-night college radio show is about. I wanted to ring up DJ FML and request Pearls Before Swine but she was doing fine on her own, plus, driving. I took DJ FML's lead and let the merry pranksters soundtrack the Albertson's. It was degrees less jarring than the kid screaming NOOOOO over the anonymous R&B holiday Muzak.

The Incredible String Band, "A Very Cellular Song"

Last night at Teddy's, my buddy Clarke and I were nursing a Jack and Coke setup in a back corner booth as Larry Garner was interspersing extended, encyclopedic blues/funk workouts with stories about how integration put him in contact with hippie girls and LSD. Teddy has a million blinking, shimmering competitors for one's attention going on in the place. Clarke asked if I could see the band where I was sitting and I said that I could see that one flat screen recasting the stage like a personal size Jumbotron. He was quick to point out that it was playing actually a DVD of a different show recorded there.

I said this level of stimulus, of congenial mayhem was about as awesome as it could get, when suddenly Teddy's wife appeared passing around a tray of cupcakes.

For instance, wrap your brain around Granny dancing with Mr. Peyton who was sporting an electric mohawk for the evening. I'm not sure how old either are exactly, but they are up there. Larry, performing in the background, who himself is almost 60, said Mr. Peyton was the neighborhood barber when he was a kid.

I put both of these things on Facebook and wondered whether it is even worth blogging further, which is the most precious wonder one can transmit. But it all is precious. Facebook is like taking core samples to see what might have lived down in the ice; the long form is strapping on mukluks and consorting with the Emperor penguins.

Piece of John Fahey's "Song" from Of Rivers and Religion

It's what late night radio shows are for - the extended traipse through a thing that interested you, to give it more than a fleeting glance. No one is listening, or rather if they are, they are along for the ride, so you can go where you truly must. The DJ went from the Incredibles' alchemist lair to the Kingston Trio and the Mamas and the Papas and on through familiar ground, which works too. No matter how flat the world seems, there are still valleys and peaks and chasms in which to stare. Or massive explosions, staged for nothing more than to make fart noises in their passing.

PS: William Bowers once killed me in an anecdote he wrote for the Oxford American, saying he was left standing there like "a blinking, farting robot" - one of many things that guy wrote that left me in a similar state. Whatever happened to that guy?

You need to read his "All We Read Are Freaks" if you haven't, which I had in my head was all about Jane Austen, which would tie this up nicely, but it's about Emily Dickinson. Close enough.

metal on the brain

2011-12-02T10:37:00.001-06:00

The kiln in the sculpture building is so metal, even if though it is actually brick.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
The Atlas Moth, A Glorified Piece of Blue Sky
Liturgy, Aesthethica
Wolves in the Throne Room, Celestial Lineage

I'm letting the black glow of Brandon Stousy's "The Top 40 Metal Albums of 2011" for Pitchfork guide my way today. Liturgy, listed his addendum, is like Ragnarok on Ice; graceful and causes one to occasionally gasp.

Liturgy, "Returner"

Baton Rouge's DIY-meets-D&D horde Thou makes the list twice!
(cross posted at Goodreads) The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Luminous. I'm embarrassed to admit this is the first Joan Didion book I have read. As you probably already know, it's full of meditative simple lines about death and grief and moving on but the one that keeps ringing in my head is "I just can't see an upside in this." I don't think I've ever read a more honest reaction to death. Or to anything.

Joan Didion is kinda metal when you think about it. She goes into suburban darkness, embracing her excesses while exposing the rawest parts of our humanity.
People got metal on the brain today. It's all the rage on my friend's list, even rage against it, and my boy Randy posted this wonder.

Alternate Reality, "The King That Never Was". Not enough back story.
If I may take this a rung lower, New Orleans, LA's own Pacifist.

Pacifist, "Happiness". Not safe for work. Or home.
Someone from Thou commented that Liturgy was "hipster metal" and I contend that if it was "hipster dad metal", it would fit my exact demographic. I understand those who see little delineation among these three videos, which is what I appreciate about metal. It goes deeper into the hearts of American peculiarity and anxiety than any other music. I actually like Liturgy a lot and already regret pointing anyone to Pacifist even before hitting "publish".

I got to Pacifist by a mere two YouTube recommendation clicks from Liturgy, so I'll admit, metal is a fine, brutal line to walk.

Wolves in the Throne Room, "Thuja Magus Imperium"

"Ozzy Shirt" Gets Honorable Mention in DaCapo's Best Music Writing 2011

2011-12-02T08:59:00.001-06:00

Original story art: "The Ozzy Shirt" by L. Steve Williams

I have had such a spate of good news on the writerly front lately that I am sure the villagers are about to announce my reign is over as they cut my throat.
I flip through the table of contents of each year's Best Music Writing from DaCapo and dramatically sigh to myself, "maybe next year", except I got word it is this year! My OffBeat story "The Ozzy Osbourne T-Shirt" was included among editor Alex Ross's honorable mentions in the 2011 edition. Alex Ross is my favorite music writer - his The Rest is Noise is my gold standard. It is humbling to be so honored and even mentioned.
In this month's Country Roads, I have three stories: one where Chef Scott Varnadoe suggest that you, among other things, inject a turkey with liquified pork fat before you fry it; one where I visit master woodworker Ford Thomas at his studio, and one where I muse about Christmas, Zooey Deschanel, the Avett Brothers and my lovely wife.

I'm most thrilled that Maya took the photo for the last story.
Last August, I went to cover a breakdancing competitions where I learned, among other things, that it's not called "breakdancing", not if you're for real about it. I was sure the piece was lost to the ether but it surfaced in the Decemner issue of 225.

Hers's a video of B-Boys United squaring off against Sleepless in Seattle (I think) in the final round.
You could have worse side gigs than mine.

You are sick of hearing about

2011-12-01T09:07:00.001-06:00

Here's to all of us!

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
The Divine Comedy, Bang Goes the Knighthood
Epic Soundtracks, Rise Above (Via this guy's YouTube playlist)

I'm re-reading Pride and Prejudice for a magazine story, if one needs an excuse. It's also the payday before the holidays payday so I got some new clothes and I'm strutting around like a JCPenny catalog model listening to smart, self-referential, literary-minded Britpop in the sudden crispness of what passes for the autumn/winter cusp in these swampy parts.

The Divine Comedy, "At The Indie Disco".

Pretty much nails the 80's/90's college rock experience. Who knew the Divine Comedy was still poking their walking stick at it after all these years. The whole of 2010's Bang Goes the Knighthood is a sophisticated wonder. This one is a winner too.

The Divine Comedy, "I Like"
You are sick of hearing about each increment in the book's progress, I'm sure, but then you are free to read what you like so...
Ace rock 'n' roll scribe Joe Bonomo linked to the page for my book at LSU Press, which I hadn't even seen yet. I knew it was coming, but he found it before I did. And with that, I can officially share the cover art for those of you I haven't shown it to on my phone.
Y'all know about Epic Soundtracks, right?

Epic Soundtracks, "Everybody Else is Wrong"

It's our last day of class today, and the final teams are doing their presentations and I'm really proud of the work they've done and look forward to one day hitting some or all of them up for a job when they are running the show.

Toot the horns, me!

2011-11-30T09:12:00.001-06:00

Felt, Forever Breathes the Lonely Word and Poem of the River
Blut Aus Nord, 777 - Sect(s) and 777 - The Desanctification
Julian Cope, Jehovahkill
Skrillex, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites

The big news is that my forthcoming book Louisiana Saturday Night: Looking for a Good Time in South Louisiana's Juke Joints, Honky Tonks, and Dance Halls is featured (or rather the sumptuous cover photo of Teddy's Juke Joint, taken by Frank McMains) is featured on the cover of the LSU Press Spring 2012 catalog. Then, four pages in, the book is included as well! Top of the world! Toot the horns, me!
One of my students interviewed me for the student paper about Google Maps stealing peoples numbers with their little camera cars. I hope I got the bit about packets right.
Then, HTMLGiant ran a thing I wrote about Joshua Cohen's writing that proved to be surprisingly contentious. The wrecking ball always completes its parabola.
I was thinking about Felt, the worlds greatest cult band, and the phrase "forever breathes the lonely word" and the crematory smoke in my Cohen piece and where words go when they leave your mouth or the printers or in a digital sense, the submit button. I was thinking about how Lawrence from Felt came up with a plan to do ten (10) albums and ten (10) singles and then dissolved the project and stuck with plan and for the most part clammed up about the whole thing, and how that says so much more than saying something does. Then I was thinking about what a perfect little world "Declaration" is.

Felt, "Declaration"
The gentlest of 80's English bedsit pop (Felt) and contemporary French obscuro metal (Blut Aus Nord) may be indeed curious bedfellows, but they both speak to me from the depths of their respective hermetic lairs. Each act has a tentacle in the circle of the mystic.

Blut Aus Nord, "Epitome IV"

Speaking of strange bedfellows, in the December 2012 issue of OffBeat, I have a profile of Finnish, accordion-and-fiddle-wielding folk metal horde Korpiklaani, appearing at the Hangar on Dec. 11. Surely that is something we can all get behind.

Korpiklaani, "Surma"

I need to scratch my head

2011-11-28T08:53:00.001-06:00

Image of Ken Russell from "A Ken Russell Interlude" by Kimberly Linbergs in Cinebeats.

Wild Billy Childish's the Buff Medways, The Medway Wheelers
Coco Robicheaux, Hoodoo Party
The Prisoners, The Last Fourfathers
The Nightingales, Out of True
The Nectarine No. 9, It's Just the Way Things are, Joe. It's Just the Way They Are

RIP Coco Robicheaux. I talked to Coco a couple of times but never in a professional hipster-interfacing capacity and somehow never saw him perform, which I will now forever regret. But his incense smokin', voodoo talkin', Stagger Lee walkin' demeanor was for real, the New Orleans thing that gives the city its shimmer.

Coco Robicheaux, "Time Has Come Today"
RIP Ken Russell. Ken Russell's films were a revelation to me in my early film snob days. They possessed a Felini level of brittle charmed ennui with a late night Skinemax level of depravity, all wrapped up in absurd magic. It was the kind of film practice that you couldn't fence in as "good" or "bad" but more just "wow."
Altered States, Tommy and Gothic are probably the best known of his films, but I particularly loved The Music Lovers, a histrionic biopic about Tchaikovsky. More pointedly, the train scene where Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson don't get it on in the most hallucinatory manner. (NSFW)
There is a short essay about Ken Russell in my first book Darkness, Racket and Twang (Only $5.99 for the Kindle version)

I AM WATCHING THE BEST SHOW EVER RIGHT NOW
Ken Russell's In Search of the English Folksong on OvationYou might know Ken from his cult faves "Gothic" or "Lair of the White Worm" or from odder affairs such as "The Lovers," his hallucinatory soap-operatic feature about Tchaikovsky. Ken operates on a weird plane at the corner of Fellini and Pee Wee Herman, with a little Argento thrown in for flava, in a tea-and-crumpets English pomp stylee.
It opened with a dream sequence with Ken wearing these square sunglasses that had the word "falling" built into the frame. He was seated in a Lawrence Welk-vivid garden gazebo, where a dowdy English soprano is lolling out a sea shanty. He awakes, plays some 78's for his dog, and then announces, pushing his face through a bouquet of flowers, that he was going to go in search of folk music among the folk.He stumbles through some Teletubbies countryside to a pub, where a metal outfit named "So What" appears and breaks into song. Ken focuses a camcorder on the trashy/foxy lead singer, and then they are all of a sudden outside, with the band playing atop picnic tables. Throngs of English youth appear from the bushes to do what seems a modified frug around them. Ken then has a drink with the guitarist and follows him home, where he poses in front of a corvette festooned with a rebel flag license plate and sings a country-ish song. Then, here come the fruggers again...This was all in the first ten minutes. And I fear that I'm not making it sound random enough. After the first commercial break, it seems that he's calmed down and is now documenting actual folksingers, sadly sans frug. Eventually it has Fairport Convention frolicking in a church under a disco ball, but nothing else so far is up to par with the opening sequence. Ken Russell has a particular talent for walking that fine line between the perverse and the asinine, and this BBC budget affair captures it better than anything I've ever seen of his.
(2002)

Here is a scene with his dog..
Somebody asked me if I was serious when I said I actually liked Lulu, the almost categorically panned recent collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica and my answer can be found at the end of the Ken Russell piece. It walks a line between perverse and asinine. It is a risky flailing of artistic emotion from a group of people who have long paid their dues, crafting personae. Sure, Lulu is head scratcher, but good. I need to scratch my head. I wish more art made me scratch my head rather than does the absurdity of the news. I wish there were more guys like Coco around about whom I wondered if the voodoo thing was for real than demon-scared politicians about whom I'm compelled to ask the same question.

I wish there were more Ken Russells steering the vast resources of the BBC into the choppy waters of the puzzling. I'm thrilled Lou Reed convinced the most boring metal band in the world to bellow "I AM THE TABLET" with the confidence of a madman. The more I listen to music of the 70's, like even the hugely popular music like Chicago, I'm struck how weird it all is. How surprising things were. The world could fall apart any minute back then, just like it can now. I am glad a few people are willing to keep it appropriately weird.

"I might enjoy falconry"

2011-11-26T16:38:00.001-06:00

Black Butler
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

I reviewed A Time of Gifts over at the Goodreads and offer it here for your reading pleasure:

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Patrick Fermor possesses in this text a conversational way with history that I openly envy. He can talk about the first Apostlic King of Christian Hungary as easily and normally as we might allude to so-and-so from the office. Plus, I am a sucker for any book where someone walks from one place to a distant other - in the is case, from Holland to the Danube; this book details the first half of a trek to Constantinople at the eve of World War II. He captures the all-encompassing hallucinatory intake of a walk. He leaves no little musings out, which can make a reader glaze over pretty quickly. It did so to me enough times that I had to thumb back plenty of times just to remember where we actually were in the trip.

So, if the destination and the expediency of getting there are the key points to your travelling, this book is not for you. If you need to grasp everything that is said in a conversation, read elsewhere. But, if you believe that life's literal and literary journeys are like auditing an infinitude of brilliant lectures, and that each traveller arrives at their own destinations on said journeys, then this will beckon you down the road. I have BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, volume two of this set waiting for me in my bag just as soon as I'm ready to resume our walk.

There is a great joint profile of Fermor and similar writer Bruce Chatwin in the Decembe 2011 Harper's that led me to his cuious doorstep.

View all my reviews

Maya is immediately deep into this anime series she saw at a friend's house called Black Butler. I am relieved that it is not about the exploits of an wisecracking African-American servant, but is instead a Victorian, Jack the Ripper mystery being solved by a moody boy with hair dangling over one of his giant glistening eyes and a tall Anime-English unflappable butler who wears all black. The best part in each episode is the 3-second intermission.

Black Butler intermission.
Like, that's it. It us actually two little scenes with the weird clarinet ditty, but still only a few seconds. Is it a meta-intermission, or do they just have like a flash screen when they originally appeared n TV in Japan. Does anime appear n TV in japan first? The main thing I like about anime is that I don't really get it. Otherwise, it's not my bag. Maya has watched about 20 episodes of it and is right now indoctrinating a friend and about to corrupt another as soon as they get here.

I am pecking this out on an Android tablet I have for work, partially so I can surrender my iPad to them so they can watch 20 more episodes on Netflix later, and partially because I am under the iSpell and am curious how life is hunched over an Android. After the robot wars and post the Age of Man, we will be all too familiar with such a feeling.

It's not so bad; some things are better, like the Spotify layout is better and I like how they do the text cursor, but overall it is still a little counterintuitive. Immediate understanding is how the iPad gets you. It's like you muse, "I might enjoy falconry" into the air and suddenly you have this gorgeous falcon looking badass on your wrist, awaiting your silent command. Android is a little more like a cool remote control car from Radio Shack. Plus, the whole design ethos is very Space Mountain on Android vs. the antiseptic HAL-like sociopathic calm of the iPad.

Ugh. I'm even boring myself with this. I'm going to embark on a more meaningful product comparison as displayed below.

Don't get me started on the camera.

the curvature of the earth

2011-11-25T19:15:00.001-06:00

I always forget how flat it is when I drive down to Houma, where I grew up one of those times I grew up.

The Clash, Sandinista!
Duke Ellington, Live at Newport
Radiohead, OK Computer

My favorite part of my favorite route there is this marshy, palmetto festooned stretch of LA 20 around Vacherie. I half expect a dinosaur to emerge from either side of the road.

I was going to say something about the curvature of the earth in regards to the first photograph, but I think this photo better demonstrates the phenomenon of charting one's fleeting existence at one point in the warp of time-space. Stare at the deviled egg spiral atop the potato salad and learn the secrets of the Freemasons. My mom said it this is how her mom always served it. I'm certain my grandma served this same dish at many a function of Eastern Star, the Masonic Ladies Auxiliary.

Some people are members of cabals, the nature of whose activities remain obscured.

Wrap your brain around this process: strawberries in peach Jell-O over a layer of sweetened cream cheese over a layer of crushed pretzels. Church picnic good.

Somehow I dislodged the memory battery of my camera and it reset the date to Jan. 1, 1980, and this photo, enhanced with Snapseed's more dramatic filers, likely depicts my feelings about the place mid that decade. Put on a New Order tape and you'd nail it. I've come to appreciate Houma in a new light, having grown up a few times since then.

Thanksgiving is exciting!

2011-11-23T09:52:00.001-06:00

Happy Anniversary to us! Thirteen years!

Beecher's Issue One
Various Artists, Zabriskie Point: Original Soundtrack
Sandy Denny, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

She's in charge of getting the turkey this year.

The lumpia meat is asmimmer! The banana ketchup is at the ready! The ham is in the crock pot! The world famous jalapeño sausage cheese bread from Bourque's Supermarket is in the little foil thing it comes in! Someone else is doing pies! Thanksgiving is exciting!

William S. Burroughs, "A Thanksgiving Prayer"

Seems like last Thanksgiving I read "Howl" for some reason. You want to apply reasons for going back to the classics. Instead, I wanted to be the first to post "A Thanksgiving Prayer" on Facebook, but one other up beat me to it. Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Watch out for those in philanderer's ties and murderer's shoes! Eat through your imperialist shame! Did I mention banana ketchup? I did!

Look at the pretty flower!

2011-11-22T17:34:00.000-06:00

Abutilon × hybridum. Lantern Tree or, Flowering Maple

Sunday:
Chicago, Chicago III
Charles Mingus, The Clown
National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Varèse: Orchestral Works, Vol 1

Monday:
Matthew Dear, Black City
YACHT, Shangri-La
Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air and In C
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (via this profile in Harper's, which I guess you can't see unless you already have the magazine, but its a good article anyway.)

Tuesday:
Klaus Schulze, X
Future Sound of London/Amorphous Androgynous, The Otherness

It's been a busy week. I did the NYT puzzle everyday. I got ~2,000 words down on a new possible book project. A student just showed up. Gotta go. Look at the pretty flower!

R.I.P. David Rush

2011-11-22T09:34:00.001-06:00

David Rush, "Free Radicals" 2006. More of David's art can be seen at his Flickr page.

Back in the early 1990's I hosted a radio show for experimental music on KLSU with one of my friends. It ran late Saturday nights when no one was listening, a perfect place for Geoff and I to vent our needs for aural weirdness. We had our preferences: Geoff went for highly textured sample-driven pieces; I was all about 60's free jazz loft catharsis and dada art pranks. It worked because these puzzle-less pieces started to find a way to fit together.

This show attracted like-minded disparate thinkers. A grad student with a difficult personality and even more difficult jazz records started showing up. One of our regular callers resided in a halfway house. Another was a sixteen year old misfit who we met in person one evening when her dad dropped her off at the back door of the station at 11 PM and drove off. It also attracted David Rush.

David was then, and on into adulthood, a calming influence. His deep voice, always deeper than you expected to be coming out of his sweet, round head, took on the mannered hush of an air conditioner kicking on when he spoke. While the rest of us were turning our personal manifestos into unlistenable playlists, David played calm music. Music that moved but stood still. Stuff woven of calm methodologies and a willingness to wonder. There were clashes among this gaggle of radio hosts with something to prove to our no listeners, so much so that another friend did an ethnography of this late night dysfunctional family. David just quietly waited until he could play his records. The last conversation David and I had in person was about Klaus Schultze.

Klaus Schultze, "Floating"

I lost touch with David over the years until I encountered him at a local art show, or more correctly, encountered his work. His paintings are joyous, curious things, as dense and methodical as the music he loved. They are fantasies and sci-fi landscapes and computational grids, vivid and purposed, but not looking bully your eye. He believed in science and process and philosophy and I gathered that those things coalesced into a form of spirituality for him, which is how a spirituality should form.

The circumstances of his passing are unclear, but it seems that he had an ongoing medical problem that overcame him and and he died in his sleep. So, wherever/whatever that spirit is now, here's hoping the sky is filled with nice, round stars and the wind makes a low electronic throb through the trees.

cracklins and pies

2011-11-20T18:57:00.001-06:00

The only things to get in Krotz Springs are cracklins and speeding tickets. Fortunately it was only the former for me today on this research trip. That and a boudin ball from Kartchner's Grocery got me rolling.

My destination was Lecompte up near the middle of the state. It has pies on all its insignia solely because of Lea's Lunchroom, the center of the Louisiana pie vortex. Somebody needs to turn this sign into a t-shirt quick.

The general. It's like a Wayne Thiebald painting come to life.

The specific. It's like what sweet potatoes dream about being.

The town has a typical Louisiana history. Like, I'm surprised there is not a parenthetical in there saying "(not that Thomas Jefferson)". Unless it is.

It was gorgeous and iconic out there in Acadiana. This is coming back across the Krotz Springs bridge, floating on a clowd of cracklins and pies, into the autumnal bosom. Love it here.

party

2011-11-20T18:34:00.001-06:00

The Tedeschi Trucks Band, Revelator
Otis Rush, Otis's Blues
Buddy Guy, Blue on Blues
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

I could listen to Susan Tedeschi do ahhhohhhwaaahoooo blues inflection 50x in a song and love it. Problem is, she does ~60x on every song on Revelator. The album is smooth as God's own artisan bourbon and it did get the bathroom scrubbed but I don't know that is the highest praise I can give a record.

Otis's Blues, though, I was into every micron of that one. Anyone know who the female singer on "Maybe the Last Time" is? Blues aficionados can probably ID her from a mile away but I will cozy up to my ignorance. The Internet seems devoid of this crucial bit of info.

I sent my query into the cloud, or to the hive - which is it when you ask Facebook? I was talking social media and Spotify and digital stuff at that party last night - do not let that detail besmirch the image of a "party"; there was beer and girls there too - with a couple professorial types - if one is an adjunct, can one consider oneself in that type? The conversation turned to tenure, which is outside whatever professorial purview I might claim. Anyway, someone said, "yeah, but aren't all these websites fads?" and yes, they are, but the information strategies aren't.

One fellow traveller thought the singer in question might be Little Walter. I thought it was a woman. I mean, generally, all those Little guys can rock a mean falsetto, but some spot checks through the Little Walter catalog confirms it ain't him. I'm going to eat some black eyed peas and see if the answer doesn't appear to me.

Turns out it was not even Otis Rush on the album. The song is Big Momma Thornton, the rest of the record is Muddy Waters and B. B. King. The Internet proper was all wrong, but the Internet improper through crowd sourcing got it right. Like I said, it's the strategy that matters. This crowd sourcing, even though it was among people I knew in real life, would have never have happened without the connective tissue of Facebook. And I'm already tired of this point. Maybe that's why I don't get invited to very many parties.

This year's night

2011-11-19T08:34:00.001-06:00

White Light Night! Mid-city Baton Rouge has a number of these artwalk things throughout the year - there is a "Hot Art, Cool Nights", another "lights" of some sort I think - all in the past trying to be a thing. I go, I like walking around at night and lemon squares and mini sandwiches more than the next guy, and take it for what it is. This year however, it crossed a bridge into becoming a Thing. There was more to do within walking distance from my house than I was able to take in.

At one point I was attacking a free clamshell of jambalaya while Maya and her friend were attacking fresh spun cotton candy outside the neighborhood vintage record store while a surf band tore through "Apache", and the promise of navigating the place involved a second batch of jambalaya.

I will from this point measure the breadth of a civic event by the number of jambalayas on offer. This year's night, a two-jambalaya success with a chi-chi law office open house shrimp salad bonus allotment. And bite size pecan pies. Nice work, Baton Rouge!

At that stop, some artisan had a table of little clay balls on which you were instructed to Sharpie the cause of your psychic distress and then hurl it at a wall. Very satisfying. Maya went with "mean people", for truly they do suck as the ancients once declared.

Then I went back out by bike past the food trucks and the gallery gatherings devolving into back patio debauchery to a party at a friend's great house in the adjacent neighborhood where social and professional circles overlapped around a fire pit and a vintage ice chest and a crockpot of hot chocolate and people I don't see enough and some I know secrets about and writers I like and sweet drunks I didn't already know and and and... I like all these ands. Sometimes I struggle to find five things to fill the bullet holes of a post; it's kinda awesome that my sleepy old neighborhood did it for me.

I will start today with jalapeño cheese bread from Ambrosia and a second pot of coffee and see what today holds.

the best

2011-11-18T08:58:00.001-06:00

The BEST + jalapenos from Louie's.

Betty Wright and the Roots, Betty Wright: The Movie
Of Montreal, the controllersphere
Caribou, Andorra
Liquid Liquid, Liquid Liquid
Los Campesinos!, Hello Sadness
Lucky Dragons, Rara Speaks

Have the best weekend!

do anything

2011-11-16T13:30:00.001-06:00

Sukie is on alert for any encroachment on our scene by The Man. Photo by Maya Cook.

Wednesday:
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
The Avett Brothers, Carolina Jubilee
Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds
World Unite! Lucifer Youth Foundation, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain
Yuck, Yuck
The Tallest Man on Earth, The Wild Hunt

Thursday:
Laura Viers, Tumble Bee
Nektar, Retrospective (Deluxe Edition)

The main reason I love Oasis and Oasis-sourced product is that they take that moment when you are alone in your room or car or shower and put some dumb lyrics together (e.g. if I had a gun/I'd shoot a hole into the sun) and strum on a tennis racket and have your eyes closed and all and turn that into the real song. I like how he can end any couplet with "for you". As if there's any other reason to do anything.
My Zooey Deschanel-heavy post from yesterday was prematurely published and quickly obscured from view, should you be wondering what happened to it. It was an experiment in making this blog do more than it already does, whatever that is.

Edited to add: and now I think I overlaid previous post with this one. That's OK, this one is better.
OK, me and my insomnia cozied up with an episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman last night. It was a satire of soap operas from Norman Lear, the guy who basically laid the template for the modern sitcom. MHMH is weird as hell, almost abstract in its stilted sense of drama, its hyper-flattened comedy. And it was on every day in the markets that would carry it. Dig the "Chicken Soup" episode.
I remember my parents watching it. MHMH is like Beckett and like the Jeffersons all at once, which makes me want to explore how Beckettian the Jeffersons actually was. I mean, what was with George always walking on the English neighbor's back? The maid that never cleans? Was the Jeffersons an anti-colonial reversal thesis with a laugh track and fantastic leisure wear? Was the Void just outside those sliding patio doors?
Also, Sherman Hemsley was pretty out there himself. I've posted this before but it's worth rereading how the TV star brought English out-rock band Gong to L.A. to do some sort of project involving installing flying teapots on Sunset Boulevard. Also worth reading for the descriptions of Mr. Jefferson's drug lair.

Inside the front door of Sherman’s house was a sign saying, ‘Don’t answer the door because it might be the man.’ There were two Puerto Ricans that had a LSD laboratory in his basement, so they were really paranoid. They also had little crack/freebase depots on every floor. Then Sherman says, ‘Come on upstairs and I’ll show you the Flying Teapot room.’ Sherman was very sweet but was surrounded by these really crazy people.

Here he is working a dance to prog rock band Nektar into the show. Because he wanted to, again, as if there is any better reason to do anything

get your hipster doomsday cult on

2011-11-14T09:07:00.001-06:00

Photo by Maya Cook

This weekend:
Atlas Sound, Parallax
Korpiklaani, Ukon Wacka
Goatwhore, Eclipse Into Ages of Black

Monday:
Grinderman, Grinderman 2
The Kills, Blood Pressures
The Last Shadow Puppets, The Age of The Understatement
Julian Cope, Autogeddon
Faust, Faust IV and Something Dirty

Tuesday:
Composers Quartet, Elliott Carter: String Quartets 1 & 2
WU LYF (World Unite! Lucifer Youth Foundation), Go Tell Fire to the Mountain

Monday: I am having an exceptional author day. I saw the final sketch of the cover of this book and started laying groundwork for what will possibly be the next and maybe possibly another. I feel oddly anthemic and triumphant inside, like how this sounds:

Faust, "Something Dirty"
This week I'm gonna use photographs Maya took over her weekend of being grounded. I might outsource the whole Visual Arts Department to her.
The Age of Understatement by the Last Shadow Puppets makes me want to stage a bullfight in a record store. Provided one can find a record store. It might be easier to source the bullfight.

Honestly, I've never really given the Arctic Monkeys the time of day - mostly because having one dude with first name of Alex and another with the last of Cook means they bung up my ego-Googling - and know naught of the other band whose member comprise the Last Shadow Puppets, but this record has my number.
Tuesday: Man, everybody on my network is suffering this morning, like the shit planet is in retrograde and spawning off shit comets aimed straight at us. So we'll get covered in shit from outer space! Big whoop. No reason to ruin Facebook over it. Just get your hipster doomsday cult on and revel in it.

World United! Lucifer Youth Foundation, "Split It Concrete Like The Colden Sun God"

the world is not so boring

2011-11-13T16:36:00.001-06:00

Mì Xào Tôm, Bò Hoặc Gà, Egg Noodle Stir-fried W/ Bean Sprout, Vege, and Beef, Shrimp or Chicken Meat, also known as #100 from Pho Quynh

plus

a medio litro of Mexican Fresca from La Morenita Meat Market

plus

This weather! Earlier today, Maya was outside playing with the hose as yellowed leaves blew off the trees and whipped around her.

is not helping this situation

Articles waiting to be written.

Plus, the world is so interesting, and used to be one where we as a mass entity were nominally interested in it. I was reading these mid-70's articles from the Robert Palmer collection Blues & Chaos while not writing these articles and saw where "Glamour called [Terry Riley's In C] 'the global village's first ritual symphonic piece'" Now, either Glamour is a lot hipper than I give it credit, or the interests up in their high cotton readership have changed dramatically in the last 30 years. Was this profile about hippie/Indian/drone composition next to the multi-page treatment of watches?

But then, one of the things I had to write today was about this

Korpiklaani, "Louhen Yhdeksäs Polka"

So I suppose the world is not so boring now either. This other article involves injecting a turkey with pork fat before you fry it, meaning I have nothing to complain about.

Real! Look!

2011-11-12T23:19:00.001-06:00

I tailgated the eventual trouncing of Western Kentucky by LSU with my friends and editors at the LSU Press and got to see the cover for my book! I wish I could share it, but I'm sworn to secrecy. It looks great, and I'm not just saying that because this makes it one more notch toward being real - it really does look good. I feel safe showing you the page from the Press' Spring 2012 catalog. Real! Look!

42-9. I mean, LSU is a nuclear pit bull with laser claws this season and it was the homecoming game and what's a Hilltopper anyway, but man. That's an ass kicking.

One wishes the marauder mindset from which college football draws its fire would have put the monstrosities at Penn State in their crosshairs. I live in a coach worshipping city, so I know for a fact that Joe Paterno could have made one phone call and had that guy drawn and quartered in the Quad. He could've made a single speech on behalf of the victims, this case and generally, and people would be talking Nobel peace prize. And you know he thought of that, because that's what those guys do, think of things, and he didn't do it.

It's why people hate the 1% - not because the have power and privilege, it's because they are cowards at using that power when the horrible world calls them to. They can't even call each other out as cowards because there is some .01%-er instructing them not to. I mean, read this story about a girl who is appeared from a cruise ship.

Bummer city. Onto trivial matters: Jessica Lange's character in American Horror Story is the best thing on TV. The show is trash-good, but she is the smoldering ember on its cigarette. She'd fuck a child molester up. Just saying.

This

2011-11-11T09:03:00.001-06:00

The Avett Brothers, I and Love and You
Atlas Sound, Parallax
The Flaming Lips, At War With the Mystics
The Magnetic Fields, House of Tomorrow
Kitchener Waterloo Symphony, Nico Muhly, Jonny Greenwood, Richard Reed Parry: From Here on Out
Zoe Keating, One Cello x 16: Natoma

This above scene almost blinded me while taking a shot; the sun suddenly lasered through when the flag fluttered, momentarily lifting the shield I took for granted.
This week, I can't stop listening to Atlas Sound. My wife can't stop listening to the Avett Brothers. I suspect this is how Friday Night Lights was conceived.
This unreleased documentary on the Fall is worth your hip priest eyeballin'.

Unreleased documentary on the Fall.
This airing of my unpopular opinions about the Beach Boys comprises most of this week's Record Crate for 225 Magazine. Also included: the Decemberists and Florence + the Machine, both of whom I do like.
This day's highlight was a PR agent from England emailing for an advanced copy of my book! No such thing exists, though another email says the proofs are forthcoming and another email indicates they might want another! Email! Nice work!

"I got wild mushrooms growin' in my yard"

2011-11-10T13:30:00.003-06:00

"I got wild mushrooms growin' in my yard"

Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, Mainstream
The Blue Nile, A Walk Across the Rooftops
Papa M: November 18, 2009 Knitting Factory (via NYCTaper)
Morton Subotnick, Volume 2: Electronic Works
Roedelius, Geschenk des Augenblicks (ht Pretty Goes With Pretty)

I actually don't - those are from a neighbor's yard this morning - but it reminded me of the best line (caption above) from the greatest cocaine song of all time.

Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, "My Bag"
The fire escape open window led me here. One of the first album reviews I ever wrote for outsideleft was for a Blue Nile record, to which I would link but it appears we've run behind on our hosting bill. Here it is at the Wayback Machine.

Best line: See, we in that pre-alternative era had to get excited about something, otherwise Mario Van Peebles would've lobbied congress to have the entire nation soundtracked with fat drum machines and sub-Cameo synth washes.

The Blue Nile, "From Rags to Riches"

Best line: "I write a new book everyday, the love theme for the wilderness."
Note to self: write a book called "The Love Theme for the Wilderness"
But speaking of hosting and vanished and "the first" and notes to self, I found my first website on the Wayback Machine. Dig this great animations I made for the "life" section.

There are no best lines here. This general statement is pretty precious. This 1996 artist statement is better than I remember it being, but like most artist statements, doesn't say much. My mid-1990's was all about making statements. Evidently I was into Ed Paschke back then, but I couldn't remember who that is until I looked him up. I like how I left convenient blank spots for future interests.
I got pulled into a friend's class to talk about writing artist statements, which turned into my general lecture about writing about art, which involves an onion/layers-of-the-earth diagram and some dramatic scribbling, but here is the general advice on artist statements:

Say what your art is about. You want your art to do all the talking, and unfortunately, it doesn't. Either your art isn't good enough, or the viewers aren't good enough, or the setting isn't good enough, or some combination of factors keeps your art from generating a pearl of understanding in the viewer's mind, so you provide an artist statement. You want that statement to cleanly and most expediently bridge that gap that exists between your art and the viewing of that art. If you say you don't know what your art is about, you are full of shit; you just don't want to say what your art is about, or conversely, your art might not be about much, which puts you in a tough position. But, if your art is about something, if there is a reason you made it, say that.

If your art is really all about -isms and theory, say that, but honestly, I doubt that it is. So, then, what is it really about? Say that. And if possible, make it funny. People like things that are funny.

technoörganic

2011-11-09T11:35:00.000-06:00

picture : 1,000 words :: blurry picture : 140 characters

Monday:
Surfer Blood, Tarot Classics

Oneohtrix Point Never, Returnal
North Sea Radio Orchestra, I a Moon
Yellow Moon Band, Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World

Tuesday:
Nels Cline, Dirty Baby

Wednesday:
Atlas Sound, Parallax

I've been thinking about social media and electronic communications platforms as technoörganic means of storytelling, ironically enabling us to be immediate through the supposed artifice of digitalization. We appear a lot more clearly through the filters. Plus, I like the idea of a writer being "good at Twitter." Not everybody is. I certainly haven't found my groove with it; conversations on Twitter feel like I am shouting to another person across a crowded room. They gain unintended theatricality.
I end up deleting and retyping a tweet (I cringe when "tweet" is spoken as a noun) over and over. Like this

@cookalexvAlex V. Cook
(insert Andy Rooney joke about why they are called pearly gates when they are made of wrought iron like normal gates)
5 Nov via Twitter for iPhone
took me three tries to get it right. Too mannered. I suspect Andy Rooney could rattle these things off all day. Being good at Twitter is a similarly specific skill.
Bret Easton Ellis is great at Twitter. I think he might be better at Twitter than at writing novels. See this little interchange about Joan Didion's new book
I thought these three tweets made a great story when I read them the other morning - funny, a little too intimate, a little too creepy, what I like about BEE compressed into bite-size Snickers format - and then felt validation when Choire Sicha (whose own writing I like) at the Awl reposted/Storify-ed it.
I love the folk transmission of embedding things online. It seems like the most natural form of storytelling there is. It's all "come see what I see." I love that I can see that my wife is listening to the Mountain Goats and that a friend across town is listening to Big Star, and I love what everybody is eating and doing. The people that complain about that filling up their Facebook page - what are you going to your page for? To hear people complain about customer service? To announce they too support the local football team? Farmville? People still do Farmville?

To the "I don't see why anybody cares what I am doing..." posts, er, you are the one sharing things. I think you actually do care. Just saying. Check out my blurry satsuma! You know you want to.

only one moon

2011-11-06T18:47:00.001-06:00

"What are you talking about? There's only one moon up there. Something must be wrong with your eyes."
Haruki Murakami, 1Q94, p. 196

"All I want to do is lift weights and praise Jesus all day."
Ramsay Midwood, "Jesus Is #1"

coriander sauce

2011-11-05T15:30:00.001-05:00

Chicago, Chicago III and Chicago II
Yes, Fragile
XTC, Apple Venus Volume One
David Bowie, Hunky Dory
Billy Squier, Emotions in Motion

Happy birthday, Jerri! You are the coriander sauce on my samosa!

I have almost completely switched over to Spotify from Rhapsody, a change nobody cares about except for Maya. For whatever reason, Apple Venus is not available on Spotify and is therefore, in her eyes, junk software.

A fella can get down with some early Chicago if a fella lets himself. I was looking for the Ramsay Midwood "Chicago" the other night while jetting across the expanse of the Atchafalaya bridge and landed in the realm of my departed stepbrother's Chicago records. I still have his vinyl copy of IV, the wood grain one, and played it for Maya when she got her turntable. After this morning's dad funk Chicago infusion, she's said they weren't half bad. She was kinda digging Yes, too. I still can't get her into my brother's copy of Tommy though.

"You don't read books because it takes time?" he asked, not quite sure he was understanding her properly.
Haruki Murakami, 1Q94, page 95 out of 925.

Driving around to Chicago and Yes and XTC's new-wave hesitant embrace of progressive excess, it struck me how daring all this is. Go complicated, don't give them what they want. Give them what you want. I think that's what draws me to the outsize music of the 70's. Thing is, I don't feel that way when it comes to fiction. I prefer a short, punk rock 45 of a book to an epic opera of a thing. It really does take a lot of time! The short chapters of 1Q94 alternate back and forth between the two protagonists creating a strobe effect across the text. I would love this book if it was delivered a chapter at a time by daily email, which hits me as sort of a really good idea. ~~Maybe not for me; I decided to not even talk about NaNoWriMo because I don't have time to commit to it and I'm not sure sure it's a No I wanna Wri anyway.~~

Ed. to add: That was a dumb thing to say about NaNoWriMo. How about this instead: I had a dream last night that Stephen King was my new stepdad somehow, and we were having an awkward "getting to know you" interlude. I was trying to ease into saying I hadn't really read any of his books, but he picked up on it and said, whatever, millions of people have read my books. He was sorting through new titles of his that had just come back from the printers, massive hardbacks the size of dictionaries. I saw one of them was a book of writing exercises. It had these old woodcuts and you were supposed to write stories about each in various ways. He was lamenting that it ended up with a really long title. I told him I thought the title was funny, that it fit the struggle to make a story. He shrugged. Then I gave I'm a slim volume of writing advice I'd published in my dream. He flipped through it, and wrote "Seems like a juvenile work of nonfiction" inside the cover.

Ramsay Midwood at Bourque's Social Club

2011-11-04T16:06:00.000-05:00

Ramsay Midwood at Bourque's Social Club, Scott, LA 11/3/2011

I'm not trying to be overly arty here. The battery on my good camera was giving out and the lighting was too low for the iPhone. I tried to shoot one camera through the other to generally disastrous results. I don't advise that technique. If you want, you can read it as a meditation on cowboy hats.

Last night:
Chicago, V
Ramsay Midwood, Drew Landry, Sam Doores & the Tumbleweeds at Bourque's Social Club, Scott LA
Ramsay Midwood, Larry Bought a Lighter

Today:
Polly Pry, Two Warm Minutes
The Beach Boys, The Smile Sessions
The Decemberists, Long Live the King
John Fahey, Requia and Other Compositions
The Drew Landry Band, Sharecropper's Whine
Psychic Ills, Hazed Dream
Giant Sand, Chore of Enchantment

It was a pretty amazing show. At one point he was backed up by a fiddle, three guitars, drums, upright bass, keyboards (doubling on accordion), and a singing saw. And an old lady under an afghan playing a t-fer or Cajun triangle, though Ramsay pointed out there was no try, it was a do-angle.

Thanks to Ramsay for coming out and to Sam Doores and his band and Drew "John Cougar Fishin' Camp" Landry for putting this on. Y'all should go but Ramsay's new CD Larry Buys a Lighter for no other reason that it a great name for a record. It's good music too, but really, that title.

more American and more beautiful

2011-11-03T10:42:00.001-05:00

What I'm saying is: if you are choosing between crockpot filled with taco soup or one selectively half-empty, you are mulling over the wrong choices in life.

Kurt Vile, Childish Prodigy
Ramsay Midwood, Shootout at the OK Chinese Restaurant
The Grateful Dead, The Closing of Winterland,: December 31, 1978
Reigning Sound, Abdication... For Your Love (free d/l via Scion)

I would be cool to own a jukebox that just had this one single in it. I'd have a bucket of quarters labeled "Play Hunchback #100"

Kurt Vile, "Hunchback"
Ramsay Midwood is playing out at Bourque's Social Club tonight! His Shootout at the OK Chinese Restaurant is the greatest moonshine country burnout record of all time. Like American Beauty but more American and more beautiful.

Ramsay Midwoiod, "Chicago
Really, I bought OK on a whim because some crazy Russian dude on some obscure Americana message board was going on about the Ramsay Midwood board he set up, so I joined and he was the only one there and still posted all the time. I've lost that CD at least three times and rebought it each time. And I generally get music for free.
I am blowing all my good lines here by posting them on Facebook first.
There is a concept of "saving it for that stage" to which I never adhere. It's the kind of thinking that keeps people from creating as a common practice, a fallacy of holding back for a non-existent later showcase. To be great when it counts, you have to be great when it doesn't. It's the thing I like about blogs and social media; you are always on and sure, you could spend time honing the finished message, or you could instead hone the you that produces and on some level, IS the message.

Or at least Slayer

2011-11-02T15:26:00.003-05:00

The Kills, Blood Pressures
Pretenders, "Louie Louie"/"In the Sticks" and Learning to Crawl
Manic Street Preachers, Everything Must Go
Atlas Sound, Parallax (streaming from the New York Times)
Kurt Vile, Childish Prodigy

The above photo of Johnny Rotten doing the Huey Long at the Kingfish in Baton Rouge, 1978
+ Lou Reed/Metallica
+ Tom Waits
+ MONSTER BALLADS
= this week's Record Crate for 225 Magazine. The Baton Rouge Room of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library needs to make T-shirts of this immediately.
I'll add: While it is a trainwreck - it's the first time Lou Reed found backup singers that made *him* sound better - Lulu totally satisfied my desire for mainstream rock to be perverse. My biggest complaint is that Lou Reed didn't hire some Scandinavian church-burner types as his backing band. Or at least Slayer.
Also in the November issue of 225 you can find my interview with Ethan Holtzman of Dengue Fever. It's just like being there, which is good since they had to postpone their show.
Does the Rush Limbaugh Show still use "My City is Gone" by Pretenders as its bumper music? Never could figure that one out. Is Rush still on the air?
Parallax will rectify what plagues ya. Atlas Sound has made the best semi-music of the last 5 years I think. They are my favorite semi-band.

"now's the time"

2011-11-01T13:27:00.002-05:00

What happens when you ask a fortune teller for the time.

Lou Reed, New York
Jimmy Reed, Rockin' With Reed
Various Artists, The USA Records Blues Story
Charlie Parker, Cosmic Rays and Now's the Time
The East Village Other, Electronic Newspaper

The USA Records Blues Story is like accidentally landing on the greatest AM radio station, one of those moments where you are how have I never heard this song with every song, which is how I want my every art reaction to be.

A.C. Reed, "I'd Rather Fight than Switch"

I'll take the oh wow over the ah, yes any day. Incidentally I feel oh wow every time I hear the line "Caught between the twisted stars/the faulty line the twisted map/that brought Columbus to New York" all blurted out in a breath. Like I just got there and that line was waiting for me.

Lou Reed, "Romeo Had Juliette"
It makes me wonder what other stories USA Records has. Is there a Disco story? There are always more stories. I never think to listen to bebop, particularly Charlie Parker, because where do you start? I feel I am slightly more well-versed in jazz than the average rhythmless yahoo, yet I never know where to go with the classic artists. There's so much stuff. I tend to throw darts, or in the case of this record, pick the one with the funny title and the cool cover.
Charlie Parker, thought about more than listened to, makes me think of Jean-Michel Basquiat, particularly

I love that compulsion to list out the already listed. The zeal of the index. It's all there, but here, it's really there.
I read a story somewhere about a woman that worked for one of the big publishing houses as their genius index-maker. She set her own hours in an office in the basement, enacting her magic with boxes of index cards (that is what they are for) in a manner that the then up-and-coming computers could not do. She revealed her process to no one. Once she passed away, or left, or whatever happened to her, the publisher gave up on the art and gave into the machines.
I would listen to this very Charlie Parker record and let Spotify and Facebook relist the overlisted, but I'm not sure this record even exists anymore. It doesn't in the aforementioned digital sphere, itself not-wholly existent but still omni-present.

I've had visions of apps and eBooks and "the people" and the failings of the Human Microphone and "tomorrow's community newspaper" careening around my head all morning, all very "now's the time" thoughts and it sounds not unlike this

Charlie Parker, "Now's The Time"

and a little like

The East Village Other, Electric Newspaper "Hiroshima Day USA vs Underground"

and a little like this Tuxedomoon clip featuring Basquiat that @joegarden put up the other day.

Just for good measure, here is something from Basquiat's band Gray.

Gray, "Eight Hour Religion"

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T15:08:00.001-05:00

Happy Halloween! May the razor blades find their way into the Butterfingers of your enemies!

Tall Dwarfs, The Sky Above the Mud Below
Luna, Bewitched
Yo La Tengo, They Shoot, We Score
Th' Faith Healers, Lido
Lilys, Precollection
Harmony Rockets, Paralyzed Mind of the Arcangel Void

That's all I got.
This week
started out
busier
than is called for.

momentary smartypants

2011-10-30T19:22:00.001-05:00

Juxtaposed

The Louisiana Book Festival was a rejuvenating hoot. It is the weekend when soggy, scrappy Baton Rouge transcends its reticence to airs to become a momentary smartypants village blessed with fantastic weather.

Mark Richard (below) let me be a pesky fanboy a number of times throughout the festival, which is very kind of him. His is a body of writing that is deserving of slobbery praise.

I rode my bike claiming to offset all those paperback copies of my own book I'll be shilling out there next year. I like to pay it forward like that. My various editors in attendance all made me feel like a big shot even though I didn't have any product to push this time around.

A certain once Oprah book actual big shot kinda flipped out a little during his talk, going WHO'S TALKING? WHO IS TALKING?! And then stormed off the podium to chew out a security guard in the marbled echoey lobby of the State Capitol who was probably for the 1000th time that morning sweetly directing a visitor to where you can put your finger in the Huey Long bullet holes. I like this person's books and his whole talk was generally about feeling out of his league as a success, which I can get with, but man, the security guards at State Capitol have great stories and know how to tell them with a surplus of dignity. So, settle down. I walked out.

Not really because I am so sensitive to spectacle - my Saturday night of absinthe-and-roasted oyster-fueled holding of forth will establish my comfort with such. The green fairy and I make an unstoppable comedy duo.

No, I split because Maya's band Black Diamond had their second live performance at St. Aloysius Fair, which is an excellent suburbanite counterpoint to the bookish types cavorting around Capitol grounds. While getting a round of corn dogs, the two dads manning the Red Bull stand were overheard saying, "Those Occupy Baton Rouge people oughta get out there after that." and the other was beside himself. "Occupy Baton Rouge! That is stupidest thi -" and collapsed into sputters. It really was stupidest thing he'd ever heard of. Protesting!

I'm not offering this anecdote to make my fellow pinkos gasp; just to demonstrate the political baseline of the place and that our charms as a city come filtered through that kind of cheesecloth. I told someone that while New Orleans is taxonomically rooted in recreating Europe in the wilds of Ameriker, Baton Rouge is named for a bloody head on a stick.

Back on the chain gang of Sunday, we listened to Dolly Parton sing

Gimme a word, gimme a sign
Show me where to look
And tell me what will I find

and had grits and grillades and did the sorority row trick-or-treat. Maya went as Ziggy Stardust - technically Aladdin Sane if you are going to be like that, but nobody out there had every heard of David Bowie anyway, so we be whatever leper messiah we wish.

Tomorrow night is the kick ass trick-or-treating in the rich people sector of our neighborhood. There's one lady that sets up a table where you get a WHOLE Snickers and a grab bag size bag of potato chips. I think they gave out whole Cokes one year, but some killjoy probably complained. Dude. A whole Snickers. A richness anyone can respect. That's why I love it here.

let's hope I didn't just jinx it

2011-10-28T16:08:00.001-05:00

Mason jar ghosts at the haunted park own the street. More pics!

Cockney Rebel, The Psychomodo
Dwight Yoakam, If There Was a Way
Simon Joyner, Heaven's Gate
Tom Waits, Bad As Me (streaming at NPR)
Swearing at Motorists, More Songs from the Mellow Struggle
The Glands, The Glands
Mount Eerie, Song Islands Vol. 2

Ladies and gentlemen, Simon Joyner.

Simon Joyner, "Prometheus",OK Hotel, Seattle, WA, July 23,2010
Now that you are all cheered up, the Louisiana Book Festival is this Saturday! I'm not reading or paneling or even selling anything this year, but I'm nonetheless excited! Traditionally, it is prettiest day of the year, so let's hope I didn't just jinx it.
Also, my daughter's band Black Diamond is playing at the St. Aloysius Fair on Saturday at ~4pm!
You counteract a jinx by acknowledging one, right? Isn't that how the stock market works?
This took half-listening to half the song to get it, and I still am not sure I "get" it.

The Microphones, "Get Off the Internet"

Saccharine darkness

2011-10-27T11:16:00.000-05:00

T. Rex, Bolan's Zip Gun
Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, The Human Menagerie
Haruki Murakami, 1Q94
Lou Reed & Metallica, Lulu (streaming from their website)
Various Artists, Monster Ballads (from the album's website)
Tom Waits, Bad As Me (streaming at NPR)
England in 1819, Alma (forthcoming)

I've never heard of Cockney Rebel but they are my favorite band no one remembers now. And maybe didn't know then. Also, the Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration Lulu is the greatest terrible idea in modern rock practice. Like the later T.Rex albums, Lulu is in places hypnotically annoying and that is the foundation of its greatness. Saccharine darkness, like a doctored iPhone shot of the clouded sunset over Whole Foods. More on that and Monster Ballads the new Tom Waits forthcoming.
I love writing for sweet ol' Country Roads magazine. I have two piece in the November issue: one where I convince my daughter to Cajun dance with me at Boutin's and discuss the Poche's mini-mart housed curiously within the restaurant. Also, I let Nunu's mastermind George Marks do all the talking on what's happening out in Arnaudville and beyond.

Consider the booty jam is how I started my profile of Bobby Rush (playing VoodooFest on Saturday) in the November issue of OffBeat. I could have probably just stopped after that sentence. Also I warble praise about Bergen's most melodious son Sondre Lerche, playing One Eyed Jacks on November 13.
I wanted to lose interest in 1Q94 by chapter 3 (of approx. one billion short chapters) just to free myself of the loose contract I have with this phonebook and no, I am totally suckered in. Like, I didn't see that coming and I felt like I did see what was coming and I only have 900+ pages to go.
When the morning was waking over the warHe put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stoneAnd the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.Tell his street on its back he stopped a sunAnd the craters of his eyes grew springshots and fireWhen all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.The heavenly ambulance drawn by a woundAssembling waits for the spade's ring on the cage.O keep his bones away from the common cart,The morning is flying on the wings of his ageAnd a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.Dylan Thomas, "Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred"
Happy what-would've-been-your-97^th birthday, you old drunken bastard. I think we've covered all the bases here.

horror vacui

2011-10-26T11:15:00.000-05:00

You can't fear a vacuum filled with cheeseballs

Tuxedomoon, Soundtracks/Urban Leisure
Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Tom Waits, Frank's Wild Years

I feel hungover without the benefit of a hanging.
I feel like 'writing something' is sitting right there in that kind of heavy plastic packaging that you end up using a steak knife to open. I just recently finished two big things so I should just let it shine inside the packaging a bit, let the want retain its integrity without spoiling it with the want for the want. But, I want to crack it open and play with it.
I feel alright; I don't mean this to come off glum. My friend Terry looked at one of my paintings and said I have horror vacui, a fear of empty spaces, that I want to fill it all up. That's why I check out 10 library books I'm not going to read and then trade it in for one massive one that, if history is a fortune teller, won't get read either. I'm okay with playing things out that way.
I feel vindicated! I just listened to Tom Waits' "Straight to the Top" for the first time in ages

and there is a boxing match sound effect that came from an old sound effects record I once used in an audio piece back when I was a maker of audio pieces. I think Prince uses the same one in "Pop Life." Funkadelic used some effects from that same record on "Wars of Armageddon". It's a weak form of vindication, but I'll take it. I got the sound effects record from the same library that I got those books from. One of the things I have a mind to write centers around checking out the same book from three different libraries. This sense of drama is precisely why I steer away from fiction. I have a flyer on my desk for a class on performance art that a friend of mine is teaching next spring. It has a picture of a naked woman laying on the floor with a skeleton lying on top of her.
I feel a little like that. I like the look on her face. She had a touch of that now, what am I doing, again? look about her that I like. Maybe that's what I'm talking about doing, or maybe that's what I can call it. Isn't the nature of art being able to call it art? But, don't you have to do something to feel a way about it? To call it someting, don;t you need an "it"? You do! Okay! I feel a lot better! Thanks! I'm gonna listen to "Strange Powers" for the 100th time this week because I feel like I have them!

"When we kiss it feels like a flying saucer landing" C'mon!

Bonus: have you ever heard the Magnetic Fields cover of "Heroes"? Me either! But we can be them. Heroes, that is.

"test post"

2011-10-25T10:43:00.002-05:00

The devil at the end of my driveway.

Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time
David Bowie, Heathen
Cluster, Curiosum
Various Artists, Night Watch/Black Music
The Dave Howard Singers, various tracks from their website
The Royal Family and the Poor, We Love the Moon
Gastr Del Sol, Camofleur
Tuxedomoon, Soundtracks/Urban Leisure

The title I Curse the River of Time comes from a Mao poem. @MKupperman said something funny about the "let a thousand flowers bloom" quote but that was 3 days ago and I don't think you can go back that far on Twitter, so maybe it didn't happen. He will say other funny things, so he's worth looking at anyway. Also, it's a "hundred flowers." Not trying to be like that; I just found out myself.
Cluster made video game music in the age of wooden toys.

Cluster, "Proantipro"

Is that an actual tuba in there? Like an old street musician in lederhosen wondering why these art students hired him to just go "wump wuuuump wump" for six minutes? I think they had to make their own synthesizers out of old watermill parts. I forgot Bowie did a Pixies song. There is a Jacques Derrida track on that Night Watch/Black Music compilation, so watch out.
I've been trying for days to listen to Dave Howard Singers' "I Am a Bunny" from this compilation called (I thought) You Bet We've Got Something Against You, but last.fm has it as Absolute with most of the same songs. I'm not sure why; it is just him holding down most of the keys of an organ while going "I AM A BUNNY, I NEED A (garbled)" over and over, with an interlude of talking to a Dutch audience that doesn't understand what he's saying.

Here he is mangling "Rock On."

The heart wants what the heart wants. I could just buy the song, but what fun is that?
Edited to add: I could also just look at their awesome website.
I tested the bracketed, truncated media commentary but I think it proved to be even less readable than this mess. It's all testing, all the time up in here. I'm going to call this "test post" just to see if a thousand page hits bloom like last time. I'm gonna sandblast off with Tuxedomoon and the Royal Family and the Poor. Good day!

The Royal Family and the Poor, "Dominion"

banana ketchup

2011-10-24T16:09:00.000-05:00

So, you are saying your pantry is stocked with just the one style of banana ketchup?

Then:
NOWNESS [Set the controls on the heart of the [nowness]; best webzine I've seen in a while.]
The Bottle Rockets, Not So Loud: An Acoustic Evening with the Bottle Rockets [They are kinda the best band.]
The Gourds, Shinebox [Yes, for the cover of "Gin and Juice", so what?]
Drive-By Truckers, Gangstabilly [For Steve McQueen, God , and country]
Donna Lethal, Milk of Amnesia [Though it is not on Goodreads, I did finish and love it. More in-depth commentary hopefully forthcoming.]
Aloe Blacc, Good Things [I keep thinking this is an eponymous record, maybe because it sounds like a direct line from somebody.]
Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time [I love a European novel that involves ferries or trains, which is convenient, since they all involve ferries or trains.]
Labyrinth [I saw it twice though Maya claims she's seen it seven times this weekend.]
Fringe [Getting caught up with time-travel shows means getting further behind, I think.]

Now:
Annie Gosfield/Lisa Moore, Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers [HT to aworks]
Tim Hecker, Ravedeath, 1972 and Dropped Pianos [HT to everybody. This sounded particularly cool with Walter from Fringe intoning from another screen/dimension in the background.]
Dirty Projectorts + Björk, Mount Wittenberg Orca [Wasn't this out already? Did buying two kinds of banana ketchup before watching Fringe open some sort of causal wormhole? I could see this album resulting from such an intersection of causes. Or maybe if you played an Andrews Sisters record for Schrödinger's cat. Something.]
United Bible Studies, The Shore that Fears the Sea [Y'all know about these folks? Me neither!]
Zooey Deschanel singing the National Anthem at Game Four of the World Series [Not quite as bad Natasha Vargas-Cooper makes it, but I'm into her derision at Grantland. She has a point. "Where is the drama of a sweat-drenched Whitney Houston, steeped in struggle, unhinging her jaw to bellow out Our Song? The drums of war echo in her crack-ravaged throat! "]
The Magnetic Fields, Holiday [like riding a hoverboard through a puddle]
Joan of Arc, Life Like [Wow, Joan of Arc has a lot of albums with a lot of songs and they all have great titles even if that dude can't really sing any of them.]

Ed. to add: I first encountered banana ketchup at a very short lived Filipino restaurant here in BR, reviewed in good ol' Country Roads.

a world of sweet people and smiling meat

2011-10-22T17:35:00.000-05:00

As witnessed at the LSU vs. Auburn tailgate: Never has anyone seemed so happy to be let out of a

Cajun Microwave - sort of a BBQ coffin with a layer of coals on the bottom and top and a whole pig in the center - and

Never has anyone ever looked so serious wearing a fox hat and some kind of arm sock while stealing a cookie, and

I don't even know who this lady is but when I commented that she was the best put-together gal at tailgating, her husband said "Take her picture, and be sure to get the rings!" Evidently this woman elicits this reaction a lot; a photographer from the newspaper came across her last week and put her picture in the Style section, but

I do know these people - the much ballyhooed champion BBQ-er John and his daughter Grace - appearing across the pit.

You wanna think you live in a world of sweet people and smiling meat and they go lead a second line through Rebecca's old neighborhood in the drunken dark because she elicited that kind of outpouring and Maya is down the street carving pumpkins and Jerri had me put on that Gram Parsons tribute record where the Pretenders do "She" and Cryssie Hynde just sang "Hallelujah" as the dusk streamed in gray, white and green like the best put-together gal at the party and then she did it again, and you do.

R.I.P. Rebecca Breeden

2011-10-21T10:04:00.001-05:00

Rebecca Breeden as the 2004 Spanish Town Mardi Gras Queen

One of my first assignments was covering a blues jam at a club in an unfamiliar part of town. I was hopelessly green, not really knowing how to capture a story or what to do with it should one fall in my lap. Looking around the room for insight, I saw a young woman with a little notebook just like mine. Rebecca Breeden had been working at the newspaper for a while on the entertainment beat, and we leaned in over our notes to see what we could collectively glean of the situation. She knew some people; I knew some people. We made some sense of the thing. It was the first time I felt like I had any business doing what I do.

What I learned from Rebecca that day, and continued to learn from her over the years, is that we are always green; all situations are new territory and the only way to capture those situations is to have eyes and ears open and mind ready to process. My every encounter with Rebecca as a colleague and as a friend further pressed that idea into me. She often edited my pieces at 225 and helped me navigate the waters of a professional writing environment. As a reporter, she was vigorously curious, especially about the gray areas where religion and politics overlap. She was open to both, and equally suspicious of both, and understood that they are mortar and brick to understanding this region. Even when I didn't agree with her, I found her insight and her manner of approaching things to be inspiring. She was the calmest of jackhammers.

Cancer is a terrible way for someone who was the exact opposite of a cancer on society to go. I'm thankful that I got to work with such an individual. I'll miss her wry smile and that big ol' Loretta Lynn hairdo of hers. I'll miss the openness she exhibited to me and everyone she met. I'll miss the country twang that buttered everything she said. I'll miss every visit to that little house on Bungalow. I'll miss her.

---

Edited to add: Sandor Gulyas unearthed a picture Teddy Johnson (of Teddy's Juke Joint) took of Rebecca and me covering the blues jam at the Buddy Stewart Rhythm Museum. Culture journalism in action, circa 2006. Here's the piece I wrote on it.

birdmen are essential

2011-10-20T13:00:00.001-05:00

The new statue of Shaquille O'Neal on campus. I wish birds would line up on that section of the backboard.

Wednesday:
Richard Swift, Walt Wolfman [His records are like Oreo's: I could eat them all day and forget I ate anything]
Is Tropical, South Pacific [These bands sound like the presets on the Casios that used be on display department stores, or that they think Joy Division oughta be joyous if they are gonna call themselves that]
The dB's, The Sound of Music and "Revolution of the Mind" [#JangleWallStreet]
Radio Birdman, The Essential Radio Birdman [As you will see below, birdmen are essential]
Blue Öyster Cult, Tyranny and Mutation [My favorite band from 5th grade. I forgot Patti Smith did stuff with them]
The Chesterfield Kings, The Mindbending Sounds of the Chesterfield Kings

Thursday:
Thomas and the People, Beneath the Trees [streaming from their site; kinda like DMB without the bad DMB parts]
Lynyrd Skynyrd, Gimme Back My Bullets [Their plane crashed on the way to Baton Rouge 34 years ago today. The linked article contends that in 1977, Aerosmith was going to rent the same plane and crew and thought they weren't up to their standards.]
Tom Waits, Real Gone [After years of mythos-eating devotion, I now generally like everything about Tom Waits except listening to his records, but I still do it. Why isn't his forthcoming one Bad as Me growling away on NPR Music like it should be?]
Tedechi Trucks Band, Revelator [recommended by McSweeney's]

Congrats to DownBeat editor Aaron Cohen on the publication of his 33 1/3 book on Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace! Can't wait to read it. Thanks for my brief appearances in DownBeat and the Believer, I sometimes get stuff in the mail addressed like this:

I may co-opt this for my business card. Alex V. Cook: freelance downbeat believer
Once upon a time, television was an arena in which fearsome beauty was enacted.

Keep watching; via the Rumpus. Lynda Carter + KISS + F E A T H E R S !
Like I remember Boy George guest-starring on the A-Team, and the Village People performing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Where did we go wrong as a culture? Reagan? It's not like we traded in spectacle for taste.
I forgot all about Radio Birdman, Australia's first punk rock band, until I saw KISS in their avian finery up there. You did watch that video, right? I think Radio Birdman formed in the holding cell of the first prison colony transport schooner. They are like Blue Öyster Cult except more like poisoned blue öysters.

Radio Birdman, "Descent into the Maelstrom"
Last week when I saw Blitzen Trapper, I commented to a friend that they were knockin' on the door of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and should have just broken into a couple bars of "Sweet Home Alabama" like it seemed they wanted to mid-extended-ramble-jams. Think how thrilled everyone would have been. I feel that way when bands complain about hecklers yelling "Play 'Freebird'"; the complaint being a more pervasive cliche than the incident. Play it, then. Shut everybody up. Put away all the baggage you might have and "Freebird" is still a pretty great song.

a V of geese

2011-10-19T00:05:00.002-05:00

OK, a little more than blue skies from now on.

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road [see below]
Shelby Lynne, Revelation Road [a juicy, sour lollipop with a dry chunk of raw sugar in the middle]
Dire Straits, Love Over Gold [Took sampling 8 Mark Knopfler solo albums to get to this and I still wish it was "Sultans of Swing" instead] and Brothers in Arms [also surprised how it holds up]
Sondre Lerche, Don't Be Shallow and Sondre Lerche [here's lookin' at you, Offbeat deadline]
Fred Neil, Rhino Hi-Five: Fred Neil [Thanks, Clarke! I'm never prepared for how deep Fred Neil's voice is]
Bobby Charles, Bobby Charles
Tony Joe White, Rhino Hi-Five: Tony Joe White
Sister Gertrude Morgan, Let's Make a Record
The Meters, Struttin'

Revolutionary Road took me forever to read only because you can run yourself through the wringer only so quickly, not rushing each snapping bone or squashed organ, not hurrying the deflated emotional pancake of a person this book will make of you. It started out a marital horror story, the kind where you yell at the screen "No! don't go there! Just say she was good in the play! Don't try to fix anything!" to become a vigil over a heart monitor or a bomb, either way one that periodically stops beeping and you are a little relieved and then it it starts beating faster and faster until you can do nothing but watch the clock run out on love. Devastating, ruthless and, in that, beautiful.
(x-posted at Goodreads)
My book has a cover! Or a cover is being floated down the editorial ice floe, a visceral, Egglestonian interior shot of Teddy's Juke Joint by my buddy Frank McMains. We bat our mutual admiration back and forth like an air hockey puck. I believe that's how this business works, but really, Frank is not only talented as hell, he's a real mensch for doing this.
The book also has a very perfunctory website LouisianaSaturdayNight.com, the spiffing up of which should be my next project.
Speaking of projects, I just sent off 5,000 words of a thing that has been weighing on my conscience because what I originally proposed was just not working. Once I stepped back and said how would I do this, as if someone else was every really involved, it fell together like a V of geese, migrating off the horizon.
ESPN-U taped my afternoon class for something so if somewhere you see a guy with hair falling somewhere between Yahoo Serious and Jimmy Swaggart on some sports/education backchannel it might be me. I've grown tired of the mental patient buzz cut and, thanks to a lovely gift from my lovely wife, am experimenting with product.

facing evil; conquering evil

2011-10-16T14:35:00.000-05:00

Friday:
Nirvana, Nevermind [Holds up on repeted listens 20 years later]
XTC, Black Sea and Skylarking[Needed to hear "Living Through Another Cuba" after hearing New Orleans is getting flights to Cuba]
The Twilight Singers, Dynamite Steps [Louche act]
Spoon, Transference [Ever notice how much Spoon sounds like Billy Joel?]

Saturday:
Black Diamond at the St. George Fair [So proud]
Smoke Fairies, Blitzen Trapper, and Dawes at the Manship Theatre [Great show]
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road [This book is going to kill me]

Sunday:
Terry Riley, You're Nogood [Brilliant and even hilarious if you are the precise kind of minimalism dork I am]
Parliament, Chocolate City [How have I never listened to this album before?]
Donald Byrd, Electric Byrd [Kinda like BULLFIGHTERS IN SPACE! at points]
Björk, Biophilia [Maya's new discovery + a friend of mine made me want to kill him when he detailed hanging out with Björk and her family over memorial Day weekend.]

View Larger Map

There are worse people with whom one could spend a weekend. Maya facing evil at Super Science Saturday; our grand walking tour from Canal Place to Euclid Records and back (New Orleans. this weather makes me fall for you all over again even though you still smoke); addressing the unknown (stuffed crab legs) at Kim Anh Noodle House; pre-flight ritual, dipping things in chemicals; Black Diamond playing their debut at the St. George Fair (videos up at their Facebook page); conquering evil

rock 'n' roll transference dreams

2011-10-13T13:17:00.000-05:00

This Google Image search page of Adele is Warhol hypnotic. It's like she can see me rolling in something far deeper than I realize.

Work of Art: The Next Great Artist
The Cure, Seventeen Seconds
Clinic, Bubblegum
Electrelane, Axes
Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest
Tame Impala, InnerSpeaker

My daughter's band Black Diamond is playing their debut show at the St. George Fair as part of the Baton Rouge Music Studios showcase on Saturday, Oct. 15 from 2-5pm. I will be the one upfront with the camera and the rock 'n' roll transference dreams coming true.

4/5 of Black Diamond. The singer escaped before the photoshoot. Their setlist is the Beatles, "Let it Be", Adele's "Someone Like You" and the Cure's "Friday I'm in Love."
This week's Record Crate for 225: DJ Shadow, Blitzen Trapper, Dawes, Bettye Lavette, John Pizzarelli.
I am an unabashed fan of the Cure's "A Forest." Into the trees, y'all! I wish to shout to my compatriots in Cure-dom. So simple. I could listen to an hour-long loop of it, just let it build and build with more and more echo until there's nothing but grey.

The Cure, "A Forest"
You forget entirely about a thing you for a moment loved and then the circumstances of the day conjures it. E.g., Electrelane.

Electrelane, "These Pockets are People"
Work of Art Season 2, ep. 1 recap: The cast is good, the art wasn't bad, though Bayete the video artist missed a great opportunity in remaking this piece of thrift store art with his face under all that hair. He couldn't just straight-faced read from the Preppy Handbook or a society column of the New York Times or a Sarah Palin speech and won.

Though it only got cursory presentation on the program, I thought Kymia's transformation sculpture was my favorite. It is the simple move that professional ego politicians like the Sucklord tend to miss. Jazz-Minh's painting was good too, plus she gets bonus points for the craziest name. Hers should have won, really; it was the only piece that stood on its own without understanding that it had an origin in thrift store art, but maybe because she ventured too far form the original work. It was the only one of this round that I'd actually like to own.

The Keith Haring dude's losing piece wasn't all that bad, though I wanted him to weave brightly colored string and things into the original Chinese restaurant bas-relief thing he got. Or rather, I wanted to.

cold dill pickles

2011-10-12T15:50:00.000-05:00

They have cold dill pickles at Sweet's Outdoor Grill. I was tempted by the frozen pickle juice shot, but settled for sopping up pulled pork juice with a piece of white bread.

Jack Oblivian, Rat City
American Death Ray, Welcome to the Strange and Erotic World of the American Death Ray
Viva L'American Death Ray Music, Behold! A Pale Horse
Frank Black, The Cult of Ray

Jack Oblivian, "Rat City"

I think Rat City is really great. Jack Oblivian makes the music a juvenile delinquent turned community college professor makes when they pick up that guitar in the garage again. It's the kind of music that makes me want to pretend to be a rock star so I will.
I would be a rock star like Nicholas Ray of American Death Ray and Viva L'American Death Ray Music and have a bunch of trash art projects under similar but different variations of my own name.
I would use the cold dill pickles sign for the front cover of every record, releasing no less than three a year. In very limited quantities on obscure labels. Play no shows. It would be so great.
I would be taxonomically severe with the band/album names. "The Alex V. Cook Experience Presents the Sounds of the Alex V. Cook Experience" or "Alex V. Cook, Ltd. Limited Alex V. Cook Recordings" printed in very small block print on the back would be the only outwardly distinguishable demarcations between the projects. They would be widely stylistically divergent.
I wouldn't mind being Frank Black either. He once sang in a song: I wanna be a singer like a Lou Reed, but I think I'd rather be a singer like a Frank Black being a singer like a Lou Reed than be a Lou Reed directly. As a member of Alex V. Cook Unlimited II, appearing on Greatest Hits of Alex V. Cook Unlimited II, Vol. 1.

Viva L'American Death Ray Music, "Out of the Pink"

fall reading list

2011-10-12T11:26:00.000-05:00

My fall reading list, not including Revolutionary Road and Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time queued up on Kindle from the library. You do know you can check out books on your Kindle now, right?

Richard Yates, Revolutionary RoadJoe Henry, Reverie
Chris D., Love Cannot Die

I'm particularly excited about delving into Jujitsu for Christ, lent to me by Professor Fury who is writing a forward for a forthcoming new edition. Also I was so excited to see I Curse the River of Time on new books shelf at the library that I didn't realize it was the large print edition until it was already checked out and then got a little more excited because I can actually read it. I grow blinder as each mote of youth tumbles out of eyeshot; the reason I lately prefer iPad reading to actual book reading is because I can blow up the text huge.
Thanks to Fred for extracting Petal Pusher from a Pennsylvania Big Lots and sending it. New Texture has a great fall lineup - I haven't thought about Chris D. in years; his A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die lies legs up at the bottom. I'm particularly stoked about Donna Lethal's Milk of Amnesia, excellently hyped by Jim Linderman at his Dull Tool Dim Bulb blog. It is moving up the stack as soon as Richard Yates gets done operating The Existential Literary Bummer like a leaf blower on my psychic driveway.
A student of mine brought up Reality is Broken, which would serve as an excellent non-fiction data-backed-up companion to Ready Player One except, jeez, why do books about the infectious immediacy of new media all have to be so long? Perhaps the reason new media is so engaging is because it gets to it. Like, parts at the onset of The Information blew my mind, but it became a bit of a dust storm 200 pages later.
I'm also thinking about doing NaNoWriMo, but then I think about a lot of things. I should focus on not racking up library fines with this stack.
So yeah, this fall is all angst, technological saturation, divorce, not writing, and drug problems. Whee!

get the ö

2011-10-11T11:35:00.002-05:00

The rotating, cosmic game menu in the Biophilia app. The constellation in the top left corner spells björk when you come at it from the right angle.

Monday:
Sandro Perri, "Changes" (via Pitchfork) and Tiny Mirrors
Sondre Lerche, Sondre Lerche
Arabian Safari, "Flood"/"Newspaper Man" (via their Bandcamp site)
My Brightest Diamond, All Things Will Unwind (via NPR)
Sufjan Stevens, All Delighted People
Erykah Badu, Worldwide Underground
The Abyssinians, Satta Dub
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Tuesday:
Björk, Biophilia
The Knife, Tomorrow, in a Year
Radiohead, The King of Limbs

The secret to getting an education is readily admitting one's ignorance and admitting that knowing how to do things makes doing things easier. For instance, I usually have to copy and paste Björk's name or use the clunky insert symbols thing in Word to get the ö, and it took a decade plus of doing so before I looked up the diacritic keyboard shortcuts. It's like someone showed me I've been using the wrong end of the hammer all this time.
I've been listening to Biophilia for months now as the fractured soundtrack to her album-as-Universe-as-video game suite-as-iPad-app, and am just now loading up the whole thing. The app might be revolutionary, but I think it's more of a prototype of revolutionary. Björk fans are the types of obsessives that will jump through the hoops to get her apps and do updates and then buy things through the app and then not even be sure what they have at the end. Björk's fans will go through the lengths required to type her name. But others' fans, not so much. I think Gwen Stefani or Kanye West could take this album/platform thing, simplify it, and really do make it happen. Imagine if Peter Gabriel had iPad album/app capability available during his heyday. The Sledgehammer app would've been the Angry Birds of its time.

Björk, Biophilia live set. Having David Attenborough do the introduction is a smart touch.

Biophilia as an album is lovely, maybe as engaging an album she's done since Vespertine. Parts of it sound that that really pretty backwards vocal part at the end of the Purple Rain album extended all the way out to touch the dying sunset. I've yet to full explore the Biophilia app/universe to have a real take.
Think about the lengths we go to use new technology when technology is supposed to make things easier to do and how we pay for extension of our abilities with frustration with the means. We tear our flesh over changes in Facebook which is ostensibly something we don't need or want to use for myriad perfectly good reasons, except when you do use it, you use it all the time, right up to the limit of need, so you bend around the interface changes or the shortcomings of how it works on the phone now or whatever. Total princess problems compared to the needs of people tearing their flesh about changing their governments, going forth into a palpable, potentially fatal unknown platform change and using old free-ass Facebook and whatever to help do it because everything becomes a great tool when everything seems broken. I didn't see anyone abandon the Arab Spring because they didn't like the ticker.
I am quite enjoying being the LSU Reveille's go to app expert interview subject. Someone was just here to talk about the pros and cons of location services on your phone and my insights on Google+ and Blendr can be found therein, once their site comes back up.
Speaking of creating a universe in one's art and not understanding the interface changes, Revolutionary Road makes a world as brutal as The Road set in the desperate apocalypse of the middle class family. I'm sure everyone's read it ages ago, but I'm a late adopter in some things. I'm scared to read the next page and witness how that guy is going to fuck up things this time. You wanna yell at the page like people do at the screen in horror movies. No, man! Don't go in there! Just say she was good in the play! Don't try to fix things!

Then: Now: Above: Below:

2011-10-10T09:24:00.000-05:00

Then:
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (reviewed fully on Goodreads)
Nirvana, Nevermind
David Bowie, Space Oddity and Hunky Dory
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Now:
electric eels, The Eyeball of Hell

Above: Eichhornia crassipes, aka water hyacinth, invading the LSU lakes.

Below: chili dog; Robert Wilson, an accidental Impressionistic take on the Radio Bar; ornamental grass competing with the hyacinths for invasiveness.

The weekend looks like

2011-10-07T16:08:00.001-05:00

Detail from the wall at Boutin's. My next book might be a coffee table album analyzing south Louisiana restaurant murals.

DJ Shadow, The Less You Know the Better
Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Philip Glass: Symphony No. 3; Music from "The Voyage" and "the CIVIL warS"; The Light
Max Richter, infra
William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops IV
Earnest Cline, Ready Player One
Smoke Fairies, Through Low Light and Trees

The weekend looks like a bunch of lecture mulling, story writing, book reading, house cleaning, tailgating, gator tail eating, gravitational wave observatory-going, TV watching, in-front-of-TV-sleep-falling, bicycling. It might ending up looking a little like that mural when it's all put together.

the sundance kid is beautiful

2011-10-07T10:08:00.001-05:00

Robert Wilson, Voom Portraits: Steve Buschemi

I'm very excited to go see Robert Wilson tonight at the LSU Reilly Theatre at 7pm.. Most famous for staging Philip Glass' 1976 opera Einstein At The Beach and collaborating with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs on The Black Rider, Robert Wilson has had a singular, peculiar career that stretches over and bends all the arts of the last forty years.

Einstein at the Beach, Segment III
Personally, meeting Robert Wilson is one of the last items on my avant-garde bucket list: John Cage rode in my car once, I chatted with Philip Glass backstage, saw Anthony Braxton play solo sax at the old Knitting Factory, watched a Stan Brakhage movie with (I think) him in the room, and had Milton Babbitt once tell me the thing he was about to explain was out of my cognitive league. All I have to do now is get Ornette Coleman to tell me what really happened in that south Louisiana bar in the 1950's. And then write a libretto and get Robert Wilson to stage it. Then I'm done.

Robert Wilson, Voom Portraits: Robert Downey Jr.
The recording of Wilson & Christopher Knowles' "A Letter to Queen Victoria: The Sundance Kid is Beautiful" from the 1975 album Big Ego is one of my favorite things because it takes art, theatre, poetry, minimalism, performer, time brackets, control, audience, social propriety totally to task. It is maddening and funny and enraging and poignant; I've heard it a million times and still go through the same cycles.

Robert Wilson & Christopher Knowles, "A Letter to Queen Victoria: The Sundance Kid is Beautiful"
Eight minutes that changed my brain forever. I was unfamiliar with his tableau vivant Voom Portraits, peppered throughout this post, before last night.

Robert Wilson, Voom Portraits: Johnny Depp
It's the trouble of living off The Art Grid; I'd like to think I'm as up on Robert Wilson as anyone around here, yet there are whole swaths of his work with which I am unfamiliar. I suspect tonight's lecture will get me up to speed. There is a documentary Absolute Wilson that helps explain what he's about should you be left wondering, but then I think you are supposed to always be left wondering.

Absolute Wilson trailer

"...what should I not do... and then do that."

carnal mashup

2011-10-06T12:55:00.000-05:00

Patio by night

Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Nirvana, Nevermind
Melvins, Stoner Witch
Mudhoney, Since We've Become Translucent
The Delta 72, The Soul of a New Machine
Nation of Ulysses, Plays Pretty for Baby

Longtime readers will kindly endure the ongoing disparagement of my own dreams; when I do remember them, they are stupid. I had a dream last night largely about checking Facebook and through that discovering that a friend of mine had to prepare a different chicken recipe for everyone at work, which was really everyone in my class but not. My friend (who is associated with neither work or class) was coming up with terrible, labor-intensive recipes: just stuff it with canned peaches or cut up a Hershey bar and let it melt all over the outside while it bakes. I think it's because I fell asleep while watching Top Chef: Just Desserts. Or maybe just because DREAMS SUCK.
Why can't I just have a hot food fight dream about TC:JD host Gail Simmons? I'm kinda pickin' up what she's layin' down. Maybe reenact a 60's Carolee Schneeman happening but with ingredients from the Top Chef Kenmore Test Kitchen? That's the kind of cross-paradigm carnal mashup dreams are supposed to be about.

Carolee Schneemann, "Meat Joy" (1964) Possibly NSFW.
Maya asked about Nirvana the other day. It was a perfect counterbalance for this morning's "get with it" school frustration lecture.
I missed out on this in 2002, but I dig Mudhoney with horns.

Mudhoney, "Where the Flavor Is"
I'm gonna honk the rest of this day out with horned-up post-punx. You didn't miss out on the Delta 72 back when I was missin' out on Mudhoney, did you? Get with it!

The Delta 72, "Floorboard Shake"

the realm of actually making things

2011-10-05T15:35:00.001-05:00

Look at this happy tree! I hope I come off that cheery about things running their course.

Yesterday:
Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Blank Generation
The Gun Club, Fire of Love
Black Francis, The Golem
Wild Flag, Wild Flag

Today:
Jeff Mangum playing to the protesters at OccupyWallStreet via You Ain't No Picasso

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Mastadon, The Hunter
A whole lot of Bobby Rush
Barn Owl, Lost in the Glare

I biked over to the soft opening of The Radio Bar last night like a damned Portlander. I look ridiculous enough in my bike helmet, a little like Sgt. Schultz, but there is no place on the front of my bike to clip a light so I wear it on a little lanyard around my neck. The combo makes me look like I'm a missionary assigned to a rave. The opening was a poorly kept secret with everyone asking "How did you know about this?" The bar is sweet and the sound system is tied into the Apple Remote app so you can request tunes and then vote for them to get them bumped up. My friend and I did all we could to keep this Bob Dylan song from playing; nothing against Dylan, but nobody wants to hear that in a bar.

Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum playing for the #OccupyWallStreet protesters is sweet as hell, and it's probably just as well that Radiohead didn't play - I like their shadow better than their picture nowadays - but imagine the mayhem that might have ensued if Mastadon had played instead. A million suddenly anti-capitalist hip kids doing air guitar atop the ashes of The Man. Ragnarok > Walden! Civil disobediate that shit!

Speaking of unfettered capitalism, I just got the press catalog copy for my book and it sounds like a real book!

RIP Steve Jobs and Bert Jansch. Thanks for making your deal all about making things that transcend what's necessary to get at little wonders.

Bert Jansch, "Needle of Death"

I usually don't let my programming life bleed over into this narrative, mostly because programming has lost some of its zest for me. So, it is notable that I highly recommend App Inventor for you tinkering types with Android gear. It is totally fun and revolutionary even in a couple ways. I'm doing a presentation on it tomorrow and hopefully getting my class excited about it, take talking about making things into the realm of actually making things.

the dream-maker always has time for your story

2011-10-03T15:18:00.000-05:00

Old iPhone photo of a stray cloud over China 1 that bespeaks the right level of dreaminess.

Various Artists, Authentic R&B Stateside SL10068 (collected by Clarke Gernon)
Bobby Rush, Raw
Aloe Blac, Good Things
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Bill Withers, 'Justments
Gil Scott-Heron, Home is Where the Hatred Is
Marilyn Crispell & Joseph Jarman, Connecting Spirits
Max Roach and Anthony Braxton, Birth and Rebirth

I watched a half-marathon of How To Make It in America, a totally asinine HBO series about, I think, the guy that came up with skinny jeans. It's gorgeous like terrible TV shows about NYC Whenever are, part Saturday Night Live intro, part Saturday Night Fever strut. All people do in New York is drink coffee in those little cups and bump into Destiny on the street. Yo, isn't that famous jeans designer Gino Jeansaloni at that picturesque bodega? Go talk to him, yo, while I go talk to this fine lady! Catch up with you at Club Clubbo! and the dream-maker always has time for your story and goes son, you remind me of me and I'm gonna cut you a break, Here's the card of the guy that will make everything happen for you. Dreadful. Beautifully shot. I'd live these guys' empty lives.
The pitch perfect theme song by Aloe Blacc has been wedged in my head for days, and now, in yours.

Aloe Blacc, "I Need a Dollar"

But really, I feel like I lost valuable hit points just by mentioning this stupid show. Should you find yourself couch-bound on a lot of cold medicine going y'know, I like Entourage, but I wish it was breezier, HTMIIA is the show for you.
Speaking of valuable hit points, I love Ready Player One. It is nerds-ahoy fun, a jumble of 80's pop culture, D&D, and video game ephemera gathered up into a Magic Mountain ride with a prize at the end. It folds nostalgia into an origami Space Invader. I love how upends the usual misfit frame of role-playing games and Atari and presents them as ways to expand one's world, mostly because that's what they were to me. Ii won't give away too much to say there is a part where the protagonist must re-enact War Games within a game inside a simulation inside the book and it all works. And, it contains some of the best social media takeover u/dys-topia talk of any novel I've read. More to come on that.
Speaking of social media dystopia, I had some thoughts on Photosynth panoramas but they got all article-y and were thus relegated to their own post.
Speaking of my second point, the Aloe Blacc album is excellent. Sure, he is jumping Bill Withers' train but if it came rolling through, wouldn't you? This is what "Femme Fatale" sounds like in Lou Reed's head when he sings it.

Aloe Blacc, "Femme Fatale"