hot wire my heart

Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma (out today 2010, Warp)
Sam Lipsyte, The Ask (2010, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)
Crime, San Francisco's Still Doomed (2004, Rhapsody)
The Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana performing at the Lod Cook center at LSU May, 4, 2010

I never realized "Hot Wire My Heart," the hotness jam from Sonic Youth's Sister, was a cover until subscribing to lit blog HTMLGIANT yesterday. It figures; the song bounds out of the comparatively contained pop introspection of Sister like a dog off its leash. No dis on Sister - it might be my favorite SY jernt if I was honest with myself.


Sonic Youth, "Hot Wire My Heart"

Anyway, the song is by early San Fransiscan punks Crime, a band I know only by cursorily but am on like spring gnats now. Thanks, death of print literature! You and the death of community supported public radio that is NPR.org are the best radio stations around.

I wiled away my morning at a Applesque tech conference for work that featured a performance by the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana who thankfully gave me something to write about for tomorrow's 225 blog and let the audience play around with their iPad instruments. My turn at the "organ" is depicted above.

This was my first iPad experience and yes, yes, I hear your complaints and criticisms and high ideas and I'll raise you one that Apple has seen you and me as giant chicken legs in the manner of a starving cartoon wolf ever since it passed us that joint at the US Festival in '82, but man, the iPad is cool. Anyone willing to do so can give me one and I will investigate it as professionally, philosophically, critically, and journalistic-ally as my abilities allow. I will hot wire my heart with it and take you, the reader, for a ride. Just sayin'.


Crime, "Hot Wire My Heart"

The Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana (or cheekily, the LOLs) puts on a good show though, in action, looks a little like a pack of gamers trying to sink each others' battleships. There is probably a greater metaphor in that observation. There is something called "the fake Internet" that crept up in The Ask that might just inflate that metaphor a little bigger if worked into the mix.


The Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana in action

still don't know the name of this song

Max Tannone, Mos Dub (2010, here)
The Roebucks at FestForAll, Baton Rouge, 2010 (my YouTube channel)

Hey, I'm a white person, and in that capacity, like Mos Def. The Stuff White People Like website doesn't really address the white liking of dub music (possibly because nobody but me and braindead narcotics addicts like dub music), though they do discuss the white liking of Bob Marley, which is about as reggae as most people are willing to go, if that far. Anyway, white people and those passing for them might join me in liking Mos Dub, Mos def songs set to reggae beats. If you need a whiter recommendation than mine, I got hipped to this by a Boing Boing listing on my RSS feeder, which is the whitest way you can find about anything.

On the finery of whiteness tip, here are a couple more videos of my old rockabilly roommates, neighbors and good friends the Roebucks playing at FestForAll. I've known them for some 20 years now and still don't know the name of this song, but it is one of my favorites of theirs, right after "Guided Missile (Straight to my Heart)"



"I'm Coming Home" is pretty tight as well, unlike my camera skills. I need a tripod I think.

smashing flowers frozen in liquid nitrogen

Word Wars (2004, official site)
Breaking Bad (2010, AMC)

Media announcement: If you saw an announcement for Christian Science musician and visual artist Alex Cook performing yesterday in Madison, WS, and were wondering, it was not me. Nor am I this guy I just came across on the sadly shuddering lala.com (link; they've suspended embedding, also people are always trying to put an "e" on my name) though it sounds like the kind of wordy, loop-pedal kinda thing I might do if left to pursue those devices.



I love the guys in Word Wars, though you should not play computer Scrabble afterward because it will only highlight how much you suck. Also, without having seen the most recent two episodes of Treme to see if it starts going somewhere, I'll call Breaking Bad the best thing going on TV right now. So unlikeable and piteous are the people in this imagined Albuquerque; we the audience stand on the clouds like spectral bystanders watching the world almost fall apart but for the temporary suspension of hubris through the strength of ego and precise titration of the base elements that hopefully create a crystalline transparency we desire. But everything always ends up a little clouded. Good stuff, this show.

The images above are of the clean room from the synchrotron, which reminded me immediately of Walt's pristine meth lab in Breaking Bad.

Here is Maya and her friend smashing flowers frozen in liquid nitrogen at the open house



and here they are dancing around to my good friends and neighbors, the Roebucks, at Fest-For-All (around the 3:00 mark).

Hey! You got peach cobbler on my rattlesnake!

Bobby Charles, Last Train to Memphis (2004, Rhapsody)
Sam Lipsyte, The Ask (2010, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

A Saturday of circles: 1) a Venetian Cuckoo's Nest from Strands, 2) one of the TV's in the control room at the CAMD Synchrotron monitoring a gauge. We go to the open house every year - Maya from 3 years ago is getting zapped by the Van Der Graaf generator on the event page. It's nice to be recognized at the local particle accelerator; they will be a useful ally when the shit goes down, and 3) a sugar free strawberry snowball at Fest For All.

Every year I celebrate festival season with some sort of fried food on a stick (usually gator), but I realized this year I might like the signage more than I do the food.



This sign below doesn't quite have the utilitarian charm of the usual food cart menus, but it ups the ante on street vendor weirdness. Hey! You got peach cobbler on my rattlesnake! Well, you got rattlesnake in my...



More pics and videos to come from the street festival/atom smasher* open house front as the day unfolds. Here is something from sweet old' Bobby Charles to tide you over until the next missive.


Bobby Charles, "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey'"

Also, "Ambushin' Bastard" featuring Neil Young and Willie Nelson (Rhapsody link)

*A synchrotron is not an atom-smasher at all, I know, but it is fun to say.

The latest dispatch from the alchemists

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 is was 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.

it cooled our universal Angst a moment

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.

meatloaf sandwich

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.