snake eye die

The National, High Violet (out today) and Alligator (2005, Rhapsody)
Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood (2010, Amazon)

Media announcement: "Mad Dogs and British Columbians," my twofer review of the recent recordings by the Fall and Frog Eyes is posted on outsideleft.com in all its writhing, convulsive glory.

Repeated listens to the sorrow drowned in perfect sound that is High Violet has made me further appreciate Alligator, the album I might be tempted to put up as my favorite of the 2000's. He's so naked and raw on that record. I've said it before: I saw the National on that tour at a bar here in town along with 30 other people and it was the show that kickstarted my pro-critic career, so you can thank/blame them depending on how you feel about it. I want spraypaint the lines of "Baby, We'll Be Fine" on the long concrete ramps of parking garages so you experience the whole thing from roof to street level. So heavy. I'm glad I didn't have a cubicle gig when I heard this song.

♫ The National, "Baby We'll Be Fine" (Rhapsody)

Or maybe I'll just tattoo "I won't fuck us over!" on my back for pool season.

♫ The National, "Mr. November" (Rhapsody)

I've heard my daughter sing the chorus of "Looking for Astronauts" in the backseat after her father keeping this on perpetual repeat. It kinda chokes me up now just thinking about it. It's more than my medium-sized American heart can bear.

♫ The National, "Looking for Astronauts" (Rhapsody)

Last night with half a lazy eye on the TV I read the Kindle sample (I love a Kindle sample of a book; it's what I want to read of most books anyway) of The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell's novel built entirely out of questions. Even in the brief chunk of it, a rhythm emerges, a hook and you get completely sucked in by the barrage, taking microseconds of your life to answer things like In what area does your want of learning concern or disappoint you most, botany or mathematics? (botany) or Would you rather have, in principle, fifty one-pond bags or one fifty-pound bag? (in principle, the latter, but aesthetically, the former) and so on.

The future of publishing rests in the brevity of smart things to read on the toilet (my first book Darkness, Racket and Twang was laid out with that in mind, and is available for Kindle) and the devices with which the content revolution will be fought reflect that need (one handed operation) as well as those of the standby engine of communication: pornography (also, one-handed operation.) Is a body catching a body coming through the rye regarded as a good thing or a bad thing? I don't really know, but I like how all this questioning is dragging me out of the parenthetical to find out.

Above: that single snake eye die was waiting for me at the bus stop this morning.

his fellow Nerve

The Nerves, One Way Ticket (compiled 2008, Rhapsody)
Buzzcocks, A Different Kind of Tension (1979, Rhapsody)

I mean, it is inarguable that "Hanging on the Telephone" is the perfect pop song, even more perfect with Jack Lee's tender desperation than with Debbie Harry's incredulousness in Blondie's cover version a few years later (like you would leave 1978 Debbie Harry hanging), but "When You Find Out" by his fellow Nerve and future Plimsoul Peter Case is a keeper too.


The Nerves, "When You Find Out"

If you were wondering what is the other perfect pop song in the world, it is this one.


Buzzcocks, "You Say You Don't Love Me"

you monsters, you!

Various Artists, The Medium is the Massage (Via Boing Boing)
The National, Blue Violet (out next week)
Various Authors, Best of LSU Fiction (2010, The Southern Review)
The Fall, Your Future, Our Clutter (2010, Rhapsody)
A bunch of neo-Gypsy music I cannot get into
Stinking Lizaveta, Scream of the Iron Iconoclast (2007, Rhapsody)

There was a time when I would've cornered you and bored you silly about Marshall McLuhan, just like this.


"Marshall McLuhan" scene from Annie Hall

All those little used trade paperbacks with fab sixties design by McLuhan and Alan Watts and Buckminster Fuller and the Existentialists and weird little weathered tomes about conceptual art and how Now! everything was then all crammed in my perfect board-n-cinder block bookshelf. Leaves of Grass and Finnegan's Wake had a special place on top of the tank in the bathroom.

I had at least five Firesign Theatre records, a few of which I could probably recite now if I let myself and made tape collages of great important art on scattered audio equipment in that little apartment. Listening to The Medium is the Massage, a wacky/dense hullabaloo of McLuhan's concepts jazzed up for hipsters, on the way to do a story in Mamou this weekend brought all that back, cornering me at my own mental party.

McLuhan correctly predicted the geometric shrinking trajectory of the American attention span, starting with the printing press and then radio and then television, but I think he grokked the sharpness that can come with shrinkage. Maybe we aren't chipping away at our brains as much as we are honing them. He phrased his philosophy in bon mot form because that's what's going to stick to the walls of the escape pod. He emitted them in repeated thin lines, forming an ever-changing Big Picture, like how a TV does its thing. Follow "him" on Twitter. (@mcluhan)

I went for my first swim of the year at my buddy John's pool. I would've taken a picture but I was too wrapped up in the fried okra, above. Trust that there will be plenty of glamorous pool pix to come. I'm reading Best of LSU Fiction to review it but really, this collection is so much better than one would expect from a good-job-buddy title. The Fall never fails, the National might need to get over themselves a little and Stinking Lizaveta roams the earth like frost giants tearing the thatch roofs off of village hovels, sniffing around for meat. Happy Monday, you monsters, you!


Stinking Lizaveta, 'Thirteenth Moon," May 17, 2009 at Buccaneer Lounge, Memphis, Tennessee.

Home of the Original "Jalapeño Sausage Cheese Bread"

I have so many truly wondrous things to report from this weekend, but I feel the central element to it all is the world-famous jalapeño sausage cheese bread from Bourque's Superstore in Port Barre, LA, Home of the Original "Jalapeño Sausage Cheese Bread."



The second photo is from the Bourque's website, through which said bread can be FedEx'ed to you.

Seriously, it is a pie of (warm when fresh but just as good cold) baked jalapeño sausage cheese bread of which I have made my last three meals and were I to have an actual last meal, I would request that this be involved. I'm tempted to commit a heinous crime in my old age just to make that happen. That good. All other jalapeño sausage cheese bread products are hereby on notice. I'm talking specifically to you, Ambrosia.



And happy mother's day!

A premature review of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010, Amazon)

I started reading Reality Hunger on the Kindle sample because all the other cool kids are reading it and it

• is a set of 600 pithy lists and bite-size chunks about information
  
• is a think-aloud blog in book form for the blog-resistant
• activates the same warm lightbulb in your brain as does Nietzsche's aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil and Wittgenstein's fragment books
• would be better with bullet points but I get and utilize myself the cram together heft of semicolon abuse
• might be the perfect iPhone, lemme-read-something-for-just-a-second book
• makes me a little jealous that I didn't do this myself
• is designed to make you jealous that you didn't do it yourself
• is not as sexy as that Padgett Powell book made entirely out of questions
• is not as sexy partly because Powell isn't completely against his book being a novel
• is something else
• is more a manifest than it is a manifesto
• will blow the mind of impressionable undergrads
  
• is the kind of book that makes you want to outdo it when reviewing it
• has value because of that alone.

Above, an exquisite corpse monster from coffee last weekend.

like the crust on that cornbread

The Millennium, Pieces (1967, Rhapsody)
Various Artists, Mississippi Records Tape Series , Vol 13: Beautiful Dynamite! (unclear, ROOT BLOG)

Today is going about as good as possible: I got some good news on a story of mine, got some nasty banking business under control which involved the giddy tension of walking a mile with all my money broken out into a gangster stack of large bills in my pocket, I saw a guy flying a kite while riding a bike on the parade grounds on the way back, and I had the above veggie plate from Zeeland Street Market for lunch with my best girl.

The aura around me right now is thick and tasty like the crust on that cornbread.

I'm as jaunty as a 1967 drug/meadow jam with a harpsichord prelude.

♫ The Millennium, "Prelude" (Rhapsody)
♫ The Millennium, "To Claudia on Thursday" (Rhapsody)

Happy weekend, all! From Beautiful Dynamite!, the Ikettes!


The Ikettes, "Peaches and Cream"

so lumpy

Steve Schmidt, The Secret, oil on canvas

Land of Kush's Egyptian Light Orchestra, Monogamy (out 5/31/2010, Constellation)
Ted Hughes, Moon-Whales and Wodwo (1976 and 1967, respectively)
The Fall, Your Future, Our Clutter (2010, Rhapsody)
Jeff Mangum @ Le Poisson Rouge (below)
Vic Chesnutt, Is the Actor Happy? (1995, Rhapsody)

I'm sure the Jeff Mangum video is everywhere already, so I'll just make it a little more everywhere-er. He's still got that one little thing that only he's got.


Jeff Mangum surreptitiously recorded performing last night in New York at the Chris Knox benefit at Le Poisson Rouge.

I wish now I had a video of the song Vic Chesnutt played to me and about nine other people two Halloweens ago. He said Jeff Mangum showed up at his house all excited and said "Vic! I have a song for you!" and taught it to him. The song was undoubtedly a Jeff Mangum song, full of trapeze leaps and shaky huddlings on those little platforms up on the circus tent poles, and undoubtedly Vic's as well, delicately hollered from his chair, half-working fingers barely managing a guitar.

I love how in "Sad Peter Pan," Vic is just pushing the paint around and wants to be Aaron Neville. Don't we all.

♫ Vic Chesnutt, "Sad Peter Pan" (Rhapsody)

Steve Schmidt (top) is a Baton Rouge painter whose work was in the same show discussed yesterday and his work over the years has been reliably scumbled yet precise, great colors, painterly business, filled with just the right tincture of mystery to keep me looking. Maya, ever the precise critical voice, shrugged and said of The Secret, "I like it. It's so lumpy."

Land of Kush's Egyptial Light Orchestra is the stuff of lurid massive delusion; an epic poem for oud and bellowed nightmare with a little Speak-n-Spell thrown in. It kept me in good company when the power went out at work yesterday.

Right before the darkness took hold, I had been reading something about Sylvia Plath and realized I'd never read a line of Ted Hughes, and upon grabbing Moon-Whales at the library I could see why. Had I not been in the library I'd have dramatically called out to those gathered at my feet "This is awful! No wonder she put her head in an oven. Is this written for children?" and then I realized that, in fact, it had been written for children. Still dreadful.

Wodwo was a whole nuther matter. One of those brave combos of poems and prose and a play like nobody would dare today - how to market such an non-cohesive package? One's agent would perform a befouling act over such an idea now.

I dug the III'rd of his IV Stations:

You are a wild look - out of an egg
Laid by your absence.

In the great Emptiness you sit complacent.
Blackbird in wet snow.

If you could only make one comparison---
Your condition is miserable, you would give up.

But you, from the start, surrender to total Emptiness,
Then leave everything to it.

Absence. It is your own
Absence.

Weeps its respite through your accomplished music,
Wraps its cloak dark around your feeding.

♫ Vic Chesnutt, "What Surrounds Me" (Rhapsody)