32 Short Films About Glenn Gould

Thank you internet and people with too much time on their hands.

After that, sing and hum along with the master! (lala)

According to the Music Personality Test

I am reflective and edgy, but not that much fun or energetic

	84 %	enjoys reflective and complex music
	64 %	enjoys edgy and aggressive music
	13 %	enjoys fun and simple music
	26 %	enjoys energetic and upbeat music

more Pearls Before Swine

Pearls Before Swine - The Complete ESP-DISK Recordings (lala) - I'm rather smitten with this band, and I think a lot of it has to do with Tom Rapp's lisp. Lou Reed has a similar allure in his brazenly flawed vocal delivery, they are working aberrations to an advantage. But this collection is a cave, as you go deeper, terrestrial concerns like quality of voice are no longer of any great concern, giving way to that delicious brand of paranoid anxiety that only psychedelia can deliver.

Even when Rapp sweetly twitters I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful when rain bends down the boughs in the epic "I Shall Not Care" after a particularly heady organ-grinder boogie-freakout you know its because he doesn't have it now and that now is perpetual down in the dark cave, and when your eyes go out from uselessness in the dark, the unforgiving walls then just make your harpsichord or lute or organ sound all the sweeter. When "The Surrealist Waltz" swings around, you mouth breathes in darkness and sings it back out, humming from passing through your lungs and heart. It's a blind cave snake vining up your leg, and you know its there, but you can't see it anyway, so why look? Just keep wading in that cold cave water until you have to swim, and then swim in it until you can wade again, or you can't swim anymore. But keep going, because that cave might open up to the sun any moment, and though you are now blind, the warmth of the sun will register on your pale, cold skin and you, bent like a tree in the rain, will be again in the embrace of the surface, and will have peace.

It should be noted, I suppose, that our lisping Dante Tom Rapp did emerge out of this cave into the embrace of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and is now an attorney in Florida. And you thought I was going weird places with this story....

Detroit Funk Indeed

Eastown Theatre, Detroit, as depicted by the mesmerizing DetroitFunk

Check out the interior even after ages of decay. How do modern concert venues even show their faces, looking like they do?

Here are some of the regulars that played this historic hall according to this website.




Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels - Take a Ride (lala)
Lee Michaels - s/t (lala) - um, wow. If you like Hammond Organ, and I like Hammond Organ, this record might just make the Leslie lying long disused in your heart start spinning again. If he stretches out like this on album, I cannot fathom where he went in concert.
Savage Grace - One Night in America (lala) If Iggy and Tom Jones averaged out and fronted a biker bar band. In the best possible way, mind you. Also there is some Drive-By Truckers song that shares chromosomes with the solo in "Hard Time" but I can't place it.

Try and wrap your brain around this lineup:

JANUARY 15 & 16, 1971/FRIDAY & SATURDAY:
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band,
Ted Nugent & The Amboy Dukes,
Ry Cooder
(Alice Cooper?)

Thanks aworks, the fine people of Detroit, ravers, and the internet in general

RIP John Martyn

Bummer. I love John Martyn.

I got introduced to him when a friend surprised me with a stunning nuanced rendition of "May You Never" from his 1973 album Solid Air (lala) . I didn't even know this friend had a guitar, much less could play it so well, and most of my guitar playing friends do little but remind you that they can play guitar. This friend talked about English boarding school where he and his friends would sit around for hours and hours learning these songs. I asked him if he knew about Nick Drake back then, and he said yeah, sure, but we all wanted to be John Martyn. I've written about him here and here and here and probably elsewhere so I'll let the links do the talking.

the use of ashes (and Wikipedia)

This Mortal Coil - Filigree & Shadow (lala) I was never a full-on goth type, nor was I a strict 4AD acolyte - I fell asleep at a Cocteau Twins concert at Tulane once - but man, I loved this record by the 4AD supergroup This Mortal Coil, especially "The Jeweller." So lush and haunted and pretentious and perfect. Here is a student film from back then (judging by the outfits) that I believe echoes how I felt about the song

I knew most of their songs were covers of Alex Chilton and Talking Heads and Van Morrison and so on, but until I looked it up, I was unaware that "The Jeweller" was by Pearls Before Swine.
Pearls Before Swine - The Use of Ashes (lala) How come no one has mentioned Pearls Before Swine to me before? I don't know who I thought they were - maybe something akin to April Wine - but they are right up my peculiar alley right now: string-laden psyche-folk of unabashed preciousness and delicacy. They were on ESP-DISK which should have been enough for me, ESP being the go to label for 60's loft Fire Music and reactionary anti-rock like The Godz and The Fugs. The song TMC covered is actually called "From the Movie of the Same Name"on The Use of Ashes, and the rich baritone of Breathless' Dominic Appleton in the TMC version is suddenly, surprisingly surpassed by Tom Rapp's charming lisp as the definitive reading of this song in my mind. Really, if you have an unhealthy Love obsession like I do, you might need to get you some Pearls Before Swine.
Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies (lala) I took me a couple songs to figure out the singer of whom Tom Rapp reminded me... totally Daniel Bejar from Destroyer (and a slew of other bands). There are plenty of parallels in the sound and phrasing. I say a Destroyer album of Pearls Before Swine covers is called for. Maybe the 4AD guy can get the band back together for it.

A Reverse Abecedary Poem for the Visceral Realists

Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, French: Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage.) 1946-1966.
View through the keyhole of its outer door at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Zealots!
your Xanadu washed vacant under torrents
stupid rain
quiet precipitation offering no meaning
like ketamine junkies in hallways
greedily, feverishly eating death
carrying bones around

The visceral realists are the group of poets around which Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives is centered, traveling the world in an unclear quest after one of their comrades. The Savage Detectives is one of those books I love but I have a hard time describing appealingly to others - it is akin to hanging out for an extended period of time with people your other friends find distasteful, and in all honesty, you agree with your other friends, but you still like the air with these people in it.

Much is made about the supposed similarity between Bolaño and his characters, particularly on of the main poets Arturo Belano (My theory is that he snagged the Arturo from Arturo Bandini, hero-poet-loser of John Fante's supposedly autobiographical trilogy). personally, I think this kind of activity is foolish. These are works of fiction; do we really need to believe they are factual (or to borrow from Stephen Colbert, have truthiness) to benefit from their Truth? Have we really lost our capacity for mediation of information with all this Internet-grade access to sketchy data and instant emotions. Just that I do not believe reality television is real, I don't believe that Bolaño was necessarily like the people in his books. His ex-wife says as much in recent claims in this NYTimes article.

It made me think of Duchamp, how he told everyone he was quitting art for chess while secretly slaving away over Étant donnés for twenty years in his apartment, how it was shocking that he was creating art after all. Imagine that, an artist, especially one who like playing games with public perception like placing a urinal on a podium, lying about quitting art for chess. I realize this is a simplification of Duchamp, and not the same as writing fiction, but it applies when you look at this giant book about poets who talk about their poetry that they never manage to produce, but how this poetry is so important that they form a group called the Visceral Realists, and you, the reader, are straggling around behind them.

Bolaño may have indeed been one of these poets - the book jacket blurb claims he founded the Infrarealist poetry movement in Mexico, detailed in this article in The Nation - but none of that matters. In Bolaño's fiction, he exhibits affinity and irritation with his wandering poets because that's what writer's do - dissect themselves and the company they keep and most importantly, the company they make up. I like these guys! I want to be one of these poets scribbling important things in notebooks in Mexico City bars! Lurking destitute in the filthiest walkup in Paris! Who wouldn't? I made up the makeshift poem above while walking the dog last night, thinking about them. But I don't need to believe any of it is real for it to work.