It's a good day when Ellie May Clampett is one of your bullet points

Dosh - Wolves and Wishes (lala)
Owl City - Ocean Eyes (lala)
Tindersticks - Falling Down a Mountain

Pictured, in order:

• My day began with a Lego vehicle building session and subsequent epic battle. Were I a wealthy, wealthy man, this would be how I would start and likely spend most of every day. You will note that my blaster-festooned walking attack vehicle on the left has springs for legs which not only make it suitable for any terrain, but also means it can hilariously do the splits.
• Then, the brunch at Byronz Bistro (I know, the Z is problematic for me too but evidently it has been like that since the bronze age) split order of shrimp potato cakes and Eggs Sardou, all topped by a riot of Hollandaise barely kept in line by a loose phalanx of capers.
• We got Sukie ready for the Krewe of Mutts dog parade. She took to faerie wings better than I suspected and subsequently became my spirit animal.
• The USS Corsair, the local Star Trek club was out at the dog parade soliciting new members. I encourage their participation in more public events. I want them to buy time on public radio so that their gospel of going where no other public-radio-supporter has gone before may be spread far and wide. I like that their shuttlecraft is the "Beignet." I may have to join.
• Donna Douglas rode in the parade. You may remember her as Ellie May Clampett in TV's Beverly Hillbillies. It tried my best paparazzi moves to get her to look at the camera, but, ever the pro, she stayed the course. It would be awesome if I could get her to join the crew of the Corsair with me.
• The dog parade had a loose space theme going - "2010: A Space Pawdessy"; maybe the USS Corsair is exerting its influence. I'm not sure if I get the meaning of the Galaxy Poop-A-Lot float, but the dogs, like all of them were totally cute.

Not pictured:

• I am reading Peter Murphy's John the Revelator, which kicked into gear about half-way through. I have a hard time telling exactly when the book takes place. Its Irish-ness makes it a bit timeless to me. I thought it might be set in the mid 1960s until Jabba the Hut came up.
• I have also been playing iPhone Scrabble a lot. Now that is an app. I am open to wiping the floor with any of you Facebook tile-pluggers out there.
• Also listening the tar out of (what's the right way to say this?) the new Tindersticks record, though this one may actually be recorded for headphones and not speakers. It didn't have the same locust-swarm loneliness when it wasn't pumped directly into my head. I am nursing a theory that Tindersticks is the evil twin of Roxy Music, but then I need to address the particular evils in the Roxy catalog again, and possibly remake/remodel my notions.

better iPods made from shredded dreams

Pixies - "Debaser"

I started reading Andrei Codrescu's The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess which touches on a lot of the things re: my relationship to this here thing and others.

Memoirs and history further dismember the past by articulating it: every articulated experience is as good as forgotten.

Hm. I sort of know Andrei, have certainly known plenty of people that know him well. He is a big deal around these parts. I would occasionally hear that same vampire accent at the coffee shop or the bar that I heard on his NPR stories. He (or someone on the editorial staff for his long narrow literary journal Exquisite Corpse) wisely ignored an enthusiastic but naive paper I wrote on Artaud one hot undergraduate summer.

I thumbed through a gorgeous new (2008 anyway) Dada compenidum at the library; all that scrap paper and scattered typography rendered in vivid reproduction. I bet that stuff looks better in the book than it does in real life.

I also listened to "Debaser" on a my way to the grocery store. Salvador Dali, whose film Un chien andalou the song is about, was neither official Dadaist nor surrealist though I think his practices at times better expressed the sentiments of both movements than the sanctioned cheerleaders ever did. Dali understood the dismemberment of meaning; you didn't attempt to solve the human mystery with conjecture and wit; you did it with a sharp knife and a rolling camera.



Andrei talks about how

Dada is the Western now, a Zen that employs fullness instead of emptiness, so much fullness, in fact, that there isn't enough matter to fill its fullness, so it resorts to imagination in order to create even more paradisaical objets, better iPods made from shredded dreams.

That hits home, or at least a chord. I like fullness, this blog is about expressing a fullness. It is an iPod of shredded hours if not dreams.

The above photo is a Dada-rific (or at least Joseph Cornell-tastic) box of discarded IBM Selectric type-balls in the pile outside my office and I thought about taking it into my sanctum, but instead I took a picture, because even fullness can get too full of its parts looking back at you and you are driven to start slicin' up eyeballs, oh ho ho ho!

Debaser - The Pixies

morning, noon, night

morning:




noon:




night:

the droll urge to illustrate "realism"

The Magnetic Fields - Realism (lala)

I'm not completely crazy about the photo of haphazardly stacked file separators awaiting office supply vultures or The Heap in the hall outside my office, but the droll urge to illustrate "realism" with it is difficult to suppress.

We Are Having a Hootenanny - T...

Edited to add: For a better look at stacked realism, check out this installation by Michael Johansson entitled "A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm’s reach." (via MBV)

"instead of you"

Even with all that cheery tile, his self-image remained elusive.

That would be my caption were the above photo of me looking despondent in a modernist interior (instead of the bathroom at work) and posted on Unhappy Hipsters, the funniest thing I've come across all day. Don't wear it out like you did that dude pretending his dad still says all that shit, OK?

Second funniest, actually. Maya and I were saying two-word non-sequiturs to each other this morning on the walk to school and she came up with "piranha blanket." That was the funniest. I proposed that be the title of a surf rock tune for our band Dirty Silverware. She asked if her friend could be in the band; I thought I could detect an unspoken "instead of you" at the end of her question.

They say all comedy is laced with cruelty. And people wonder why I'm an unhappy hipster.

I'm so choked with despair that I messed up my blog format order! MY BLOG FORMAT ORDER! I'm just a big phony. Where's my goddamn pirahna blanket? I feel a chill.

Karlheinz Stockhausen - "Mixtur 2003 (Forward version)" (ANABlog)
Tindersticks - Falling Down a Mountain (Streamed from them)

F the NFL

Doctor L/Tony Allen/Jean Phi Dary/Jeff Kellner/Cesar Anot - Psycho on Da Bus
Quintron - Too Thirsty 4 Love (lala)
Various Artists - Gypsophonic Disko mixtape NOLA-PHONIC No. 1 (from MySpace)
Four Tet - There is Love in You (lala)

Psycho on Da Bus is like plugging your headphones into the cortex of an actual psycho on the bus. It conforms to a peculiar logic in his head, but is scary when it manifests outside.

Speaking of bus, this lone rusty handcuff was sitting in the grass by the bus stop last night.

Lala lists the Quintron album as having come out in 2012. The near future sounds an awful lot like a homemade B-52's. His gallery installation where he is recording his next album at the New Orleans Museum of Art opens tonight with what I suspect will be a bangin' reception.

Gypsohonic Disko comes about as close to capturing the current manic charm of New Orleans on the NOLA-PHONIC No. 1 mixtape, shammelessly throwing klezmer against R&B against brass bands against transgender rappers against drunk people against alla y'all fuckas, go saints, who dat forever.

And, by the way, F the NFL for reminding me that money ruins everything. I mean, I knew that already so you didn't have to remind me. They barely gave half a shit about New Orleans until they actually started winning. And as I discovered the other day, "Who Dat?" is older and more rooted in what made New Orleans what it is than the NFL ever was. So, uh... go Saints!

Phonies. That's what the NFL is, a bunch of phonies.

As for the less turbulent aspects of my fair state, sweet ol' Country Roads Magazine polled its readers for their favorite Louisiana everything in the February issue and I got to further illuminate their favorite music and venues here. My review of the new Four Tet album is languishing all dehydrated and overstimulated in the chill lounge at outsideleft.

just qualitatively better

Tony Allen - Black Voices and Secret Agent (Amazon.co.uk)



I want shirts like his. I am convinced I would be a better person were I to dress in shirts like his. Not better morally or spiritually, just qualitatively better.

I thought it said "Fela" in the credits of this short film about his new album; Tony was Fela's drummer and music director for decades, but with Fela being dead and all, I feared this was a Natalie Cole from-the-vaults situation. Turns out it was Flea. Debating....

I would have taken a photo of the Medusoid mass that is Koi's seaweed salad but I ate it all before I got my camera out, so there is the sashimi from my bento box lunch.

My friend and I were talking about the iPad over said lunch, how we both want one but don't really. I think when Apple figures out the shiny new way they will do multi-tasking then this thing will make more sense. I am full on with the iPhone internet experience - I rarely touch my laptop at home except when I have to do something besides whittle my life off with social networking. I've tried doing this blog from the iPhone and with all the cutting and pasting that goes on between Flickr and lala and YouTube and how none of the iPhone flavors of those sites are keen to expose the embed/link codes, it's kinda impossible to do.

What I think would be cool is to integrate eye tracking with the camera, which the iPad doesn't have, and voice recognition so you could have a seamless interface between what's on the screen and what's on my head. I can double-blink shit and move things around with my mind. It will turn the computer screen into the real Magic Mirror we want it to be.

Here is how the Dragon Dictation iPhone app interpreted the above paragraph: But I would like to see is some integration my site tracking from the camera which the iPad doesn't have and voice recognition she could actually have a seamless interface between what's on the screen and watching my. Either it cut short, or perhaps, unlike me, it knows when to stop.

So yeah, I'll just settle for some of those badass Tony Allen shirts for now. And tampon jokes. Those never get old.