Sam Lipsyte, The Ask (2010, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) Various Artists, Mississippi Records Tape Series Vol 51: Lullabies & Dream Songs (2010 with tendrils back though the vastness of time, ROOT BLOG) Various Artists, Earl Kim: Exercises en Route/Now and Then/Three Poems in French/Dear Linda(2001, New World Records, Rhapsody)
Earl Kim iswas just the best. If your brain cobbled together a contemporary music ensemble with memory on the strings, existential dread on percussion, and stray thoughts on vocals, every piece they attempted at their sparsely attended afternoon recitals would devolve into sounding like Earl Kim. It would be just me in the audience and that weird old man that goes to every performance until I become that weird old man.
The above twisted garden of the damned, actually a pruned patch of trees on the Louisiana State Capitol grounds, is where I would like to sit lotus-position with my iPhone tucked into a fold of my soft saffron robe, with old Earl at barely audible levels (where he's best) with even older Earl looming above, and commune, commune, commune.
Here is an excerpt from Kim's Earthlight, one of my favorite pieces ever.
November 27, 2009 — Christie Finn (Soprano), Rachel Field (Violin) and Baris Buyukildirim (Piano) perform 'Earthlight' by Earl Kim live at a concert by contemporary performance program at Manhattan School of Music
The latest dispatch from the alchemists behind Mississippi Records is equally good. Dream songs all the way.
As for the celebrated new novel by Sam Lipsyte, I just started it and already the guy got fired. For funny, even possibly virtuous reasons, but fired all the same. That will snap you right out of things.
This one from Robert Lowell's Life Studies seems a fitting way to see off National Poetry Month.
To Delmore Schwarz
(Cambridge 1946)
We couldn't even keep the furnace lit! Even when we had disconnected it, the antiquated refrigerator gurgled mustard gas through your mustard-yellow house, and spoiled our long maneuvered visit from T. S. Eliot's brother, Henry Ware. . . .
Your stuffed duck craned toward Harvard from my trunk: its bill was a black whistle, and its brow was high and thinner than a baby's thumb; its webs were tough as toenails on its bough. It was your first kill; you rushed it home, pickled in a tin wastebasket of rum - it looked through us, as if it'd died dead drunk. You must have propped its eyelids with a nail, and yet it lived with us and met our stare, Rabelasian, lubricious, drugged. And there, perched on my trunk and typing-table, it cooled our universal Angst a moment, Delmore. We drank and eyed the chicken-hearted shadows of the world. Underseas fellows, nobly mad, we talked away our friends. "Let Joyce and Freud, the Masters of Joy, be our guests here," you said. The room was filled with cigarette smoke circling the paranoid, inert gaze of Coleridge, back from Malta - his eyes lost in flesh, lips baked and black. Your tiger kitten, Oranges, cartwheeled for joy in a ball of snarls. You said: "We poets in our youth begin in sadness; thereof in the end come despondency and madness; Stalin has had two cerebral hemorrhages!" The Charles River was turning silver. In the ebb- light of morning, we stuck the duck -'s web- foot, like a candle, in a quart of gin we'd killed.
Swearing at Motorists, Number Seven Uptown (2000, Rhapsody)
lala.com has reported that it will shutter May 31, 2010, as a part of Apple's bid to control the online music marketplace. Sucks, not because I am either pro- or anti-iTunes, but lala was handy as hell for my little purposes. I always wondered how it made any money and apparently, it didn't. It is important to remember that money makes art; art doesn't make money. Or something. Stupid money.
An old guy sitting in a parked truck outside a restaurant I pass on my way to work hollered out at me, "Hey man, you lost some weight, didn't you?" Just then I saw the bus approaching and had to run two blocks to catch it, which left me out of breath and with glossy coat, but the upside is I can run two blocks without dying, so some things are headed in the right direction. This song was playing as it all went down.
Swearing at Motorists, " Flying Pizza"
Hopefully YouTube, Rhapsody, Blogger, and flickr and all the other free shit I use will hang on in this new new economy so I don't have to completely rethink my game. Otherwise, I don't know how I will show you all the meatloaf sandwich I put in Maya's lunch, and my purpose in this world will crumble.
Sam Amidon, I See The Sign (2010, lala) Nico Muhly, various pieces
The above was shot by a guy I've known since grade school who is now a geologist headed out to the Deepwater Horizon site. I don't mean to be an enviro-alarmist who believes his own outrage is key to addressing massive issues, but it is a little eerie how little is being said about this here. It's on the news and everything, but there's none of the ground chatter one might expect. Maybe we are just now so accustomed to Louisiana falling apart that setting the Gulf of Mexico on fire sounds reasonable, even kinda cool. Just sayin'.
I love Sam Amidon's album of folk songs, art-music-augmented by the Most Clever Boy on the Internet Nico Muhly. I like it even more than the Jónsi's album touched by the same collaborator's hand. There is a Nick Drake quality there, more than the "it sounds acoustic so I'll say Nick Drake" aspect the dead singer's name usually evokes.
But it is the resonance of folk in it, the stand tall to the wind in your tattered rags stroll of folk music that Amidon nails on this record. It is the kind of stuff that will make your forget for a moment that the water is on fire, then suddenly remember.
I dunno. I've been eating less in the style of Henry VIII and suddenly (but not) dropped from an XL to an L in shirt sizes. My XL's look like loose billowy tents rather than ones stuffed with stacks of meat, and that causality is sobering and exhilarating and you think hey, OK!, and then there's things like the oil spill that are all , oh...ok. Philosophy is so much more fun when there's no skin in the game.
And neither are really what I'm thinking about, or are just part of it. My book's come a-knockin', a friend of mine has cancer, and the wheel of time is still rolling, flattening the proud declarations I've made about not believing in chaos under the twin steamroller rollers of cause and effect, and someone I knew when I was my daughter's age now is charged with solving the chaos of causality out in the water.
Anyway, great record. Here is a bit of Mr. Muhly's own dazzling work. Especially check out that third video where a camera was set on a sushi restaurant conveyor belt.
Nico Muhly, Skip Town performed in Toronto in 2008 by the composer
Nico Muhly, Clear Music, performed in NYC 2007 by Lisa Liu on violin, Nico Muhly, and Valgeir Sigurdsson
Nico Muhly & Teitur, "Don't I Know You From Somewhere?"
Tony Allen, Secret Agent(2010, lala) Meat Puppets, Too High to Die (1994, lala) XiuXiu, Dear God, I Hate Myself (2010, lala) Destroyer, Streethawk: A Seduction (2001/re-issued 2010, lala)
I'm working up a review of the new Tony Allen album and keep getting snagged on the second song "Ijo", especially about half-way through when an accordion appears. I had a Zydeco epiphany from it (the rarest, most specific kind of epiphany) that Explained A Lot, and then suddenly the accordion was gone, as if it actively defied epiphanization.
Here back in the humble tangle of the garden, the first of the peppers is making its dramatic entrance, meekly pleading that I go get a new hoe already. I can't find a way to tie this into the Destroyer song below, so I'll just post it. Perhaps it too defies epiphanization.
Media announcements: I applaud the success and question the timing of the Baton Rouge Blues Fest in this week's Record Crate blog for 225 Magazine.
In the May issue of 225 Magazine proper, I review the latest albums by locals England in 1819, Jim Hogg, and We Landed on the Moon! (exclamation theirs, but they are exciting enough to warrant it)
I sing the rock Ameri-lectric in my review of the latest albums by Titus Andronicus and the Red Krayola for outsideleft.
In the May 2010 issue of Country Roads, I review the River Road hideaway Roberto's and tell the tale of drinking a beer in the Jerry Lee Lewis House and Tony Joe White's performance at Delta Music Festival in Ferriday. The above photo is of one of the prison trustees mentioned in the article. Also, I sneak in a brief review of Joe Bonomo's Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost & Found:
The scandal and the album become fulcrums in the see-saw portrait Bonomo paints of Lewis, but neither stand in for the man. Lewis left the fifties with as much fame as his wild persona could handle, and he played it with the same ferocious virtuosity as he did the piano, only to find he had to climb back up the country side of things when the bottom fell out. Bonomo doesn't shy away from the gory details, but he doesn't bury his subject in myth either. A welcome rarity among books about rock legends, Bonomo lets the music and the history do the actual talking.
I,I,I, me, me me. Thanks for reading if you still are. Tip your bartenders! Here's a couple of videos of Tony Joe from Ferriday.
Buckingham Nicks, "Frozen Love" from Buckingham Nicks (1975, via ROOT BLOG) The Books, "Beautiful People" from The Way Out (forthcoming 7/2010, via MBV) Matmos, Supreme Balloon (2008, lala)
Above is my favorite beautiful person making her first foray into miso soup at Koi. We sat up at the sushi bar - she and I share a predilection for sitting at the bar when one is available - and my favorite part of the meal was that she, the beardo college guy to my right, and both sushi chefs were all in the undeniable thrall of America's Funniest Home Videos on the TV there. "Oh, man! look at that gerbil eatin' Sweet Tarts!" could have come from any of them. My second favorite part was the Ants Climbing Trees I got off the expanded menu.
Ants Climbing Trees is a Szechuan concoction of glass noodles in a savory, spicy gravy standing in for the ridges in the bark of a fallen tree, sprinkled with minced pork that are supposed to be the ants, I guess. I would've stood a single broccoli crown in the middle for the tree and let the noodles be the anthil, but then, trees don't grow out of anthills. I think there is a wise fortune cookie proverb in all this.
It was delicious. I love glass noodles despite their near-jellyness making then impossible to eat with chopsticks or fork but mostly, I'm in love with the name. I wish everything had a name like Ants Climbing Trees instead of the foodie trend of practically laying out the recipe in the name of the dish. Don't buy into the service economy nightmare of life being a precisely accounted transaction. Beauty lies in mystery and wonder, y'all.
Another thing with which I am completely smitten is "Frozen Love" from the pre-Mac Buckingham Nicks. I have it bound up with that album cover - look at them! Innocent and ferocious. Naked and fully armed. Their vacant stares at the mirror of their love are saying, "I will give you everything because I will take Everything when I'm gone." "Frozen Love" is beyond egregious; it has a million parts, a delirious orchestral breakdown, and contains this breathlessly exhorted chorus:
And if you go forward, I'll meet you there And if you climb up through the cold freezin' air Look down below you; search out above And cry out to life for a frozen love
That air up there isn't cold. It isn't freezin'. It is cold freezin'. Love it. I played it for my friend Rob last night and he said it was my song crush.
"Beautiful People" by the Books is not my song crush; I have in the past been either immune or bemused by their French, dry, Cartesian charms but this song snapped me out it this morning, at least stopping me from listening to "Frozen Love" one more time in a row. Listen at MBV.
It led me back to the synthetic arms of Matmos' Supreme Balloon (reviewed here). Like the Books, Matmos is another band I couldn't quite get into until they similarly streamlined their deal and it is in their rainbow plastic universe where I will microfocus and become an ant climbing the tree of the day. Allons, beautiful people! Allons!
