Thursday, July 23, 2009

Trout po-boy at Save More Market, Baton Rouge, LA

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Catfish is a much more po-boy-conducive fish, but I had to experience firsthand the possibility a $4.59 poboy this long...

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The poboys here are long as my arm, or more scientifically, three Goya soda cans in length. The bread is at the right balance of spongy and crispy, seasoned right, dressed right and big as my arm. Trout is a bit greasy for this situation, as one might imagine, but adventure reaps its own rewards. My co-worker swapped halves with his shrimp po-poy which was equally bounteous. Despite it looking like the teeming birth spot of all things good and batter-fried, I prefer less and bigger shrimp. That point of contention did not prevent me in any way of eating my half.

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Plus, Goya drinks! and a giant sandwich on the sign! and meat pies right next the corn dogs and the fried okra, luminous under the heat lamp Prometheus stole from the gods so that we mortals may know The Way!

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I like anyplace that has a variety of meat boxes for sale and think a matted and hung display of the hand-lettered signs describing the varieties offered at this nondescript Nicholson Drive convenience store should be entered as the Louisiana delegate to some high-profile art biennial. I would suggest titling the exhibition "Cobra Special"

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And now for the meat porn.

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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

the houses of cousins



KISS - Destroyer (listen) particularly "Detroit Rock City" in Satan's service, or at least in the service of writing that book in my sleep.



KISS from "The Paul Lynde Halloween Special" that I watched my very own self on a B&W TV in in 1976. I like how flabbergasted Paul Lynde is in one of the opening crowd shots of this clip. This and their TV movie "KISS Meet the Phantom of the Park" (Part 1 of which is posted below) is the only direct contact I had with KISS back then. The rest we made up for ourselves.



The YouTube comment that rings the truest: Oh wow, I remember watching this at my cousins house

This is indeed the stuff of which that is watched in the houses of cousins.

5 things that people said recently, and my reaction



Iggy Pop - "I'm Bored"
  1. "Problem w 21stc rock & roll is no one's high as kites or losing pals to junk or w a childhood under the Luftwaffe. Apartheid is over, too." Thoughtful nod in 75% agreement.
  2. "Can you try to get them in earlier, though?" Humbled compliance.
  3. "What little I've read of your blog entries has me thinking you could write a much better book than Downtown Owl in your sleep." Whoa. OK.
  4. "Ok, you know how this works- you turn on your mp3 player, hit random and jot down the first X # of songs- no editing, etc." Did as requested and listed below.
  5. "'chairman of the bored.' We used to rock that one all the time..." Agreed and posted above.
List from #4:

Micachu & the Shapes - Wrong
Hoots & Hellmouth - Roots of the Century
Super Furry Animals - Cardiff in the Sun
British Sea Power - Tiger King
Willem Maker - Rain on a Shinin
Man Plus Building - Leaves
Frozen Bears - tape Eater
Bonnie "Prince" billy - I Am Goodbye
The Veils - Killed by the Boom
Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move
Jandek - The Cell: part 8
Future of the Left - Lapsed Catholics
Los Amigos Invisibles - Desnudos
Tortoise - High Class Slim Came Floatin In
James Blackshaw - Bled
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stuimmung, part 26
Sturart Murdoch - Hiding Neath My Umbrella
Mia Doi Todd - Electrafficbirds One
Frozen Bears - American Way
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stuimmung, part 7
Julian Cope - Slow Rider
Sonic Youth - Sacred Trickster
The Veils - The Letter
Belle & Sebastian - The Magic of a Kind Word
Micachu & the Shapes - Golden Phone

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

[outsideleft] The Kids Hate Dirty Projectors



Dirty Projectors have captured the hearts and minds of nearly everyone except those across the lower end of the generation gap (more...)

Update: the mom of the Dirty Projectors' drummer commented on the review!

not-metal on actual metal



Einstürzende Neubauten - The Jewels (listen) Somebody is listening to some black metal in the parking lot outside my open window, sending tendrils of brimstone curling into the air, and it makes me happy. I spent the day in a training class that made me want to pop my own eyes out, and extreme metal is the music to accompany such a thing, but the class is over and I don't want to listen to metal. I'd rather listen to someone else listen to metal. Or really, I'll listen to people make explicitly not-metal on actual metal, as Einstürzende Neubauten are famous for doing. Curiously, lala has this categorized as Genre: Metal/Industrial Metal, which would be correct if they replaced genre with ingredients.


Here is "Armenia," a 1986 Einstürzende Neubauten video by Sogo Ishii, where the sound of not-metal being played on metal is set against images of metal.

Monday, July 20, 2009

100 words about the Apollo moon landing



“We were in a BBC TV studio jamming to the landing. It was a live broadcast, and there was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other. I was 23.

The programming was a little looser in those days, and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall. Funnily enough I’ve never really heard it since, but it is on YouTube. They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead — it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey 12-bar blues.” -David Gilmour, guitarist for Pink Floyd

(ganked wholesale from ROOT BLOG)


I was born in March of 1969, and supposedly my father held me up in front of the TV for the moon landing footage and for years I swore I remembered being held up like that. No more impossible than the actual moon landing footage, I thought. A tin can guided by clocks and rockets, back looped through TV and being held. The projection and protection of this false memory has a much to do with being held as it does a man on the moon. Not saying that neither ever happened, but remembering is more about wanting than being.

make do with the fleeting



The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent (listen) The unseasonably pleasantness in the air this past weekend and today feels all the world like fall around here, so why not evoke the mighty Fall to keep the ball rolling. One could dig in the crates and discover the old pleasures of Hex Enduction Hour as others are doing, an endeavor I highly recommend if you don't know that thorny endgame-but-not of a record; it was originally intended to be their final album but instead they kept going for decades years more. Maybe the real meaning of the band's name is not a Camus reference but that they are doomed to forever fall toward a rock bottom they never hit and have had to make do with the fleeting scenery as they plummet - but the point of the seasons is not their predictability as much as they progress, cycling through the same each time but always a little different, influenced and mutated by the previous ones. So in that light, and by the breeze of my open office window, I present the massively-ignored, most current (I think), and high quality record by the band which bears the scars and muscle of the past right under a bloodshot eye squinting ever at perpetuity.