RIP Terry Kennedy

slumming it in teenage nowhere

Section 15, From the Hip Live - In the Flesh (2001, Rhapsody)

The beauty of postpunk industrial music is that it is nowhere music, identifiable because we are all slumming it in teenage nowhere, man and yet we are someplace of some meager sort and nowhere music makes us feel veritably existent in comparison. So I thought "who's the most nowhere-music-playing industrial band I can think of" and came up with Factory Records b-listers Section 25, only to find out they recorded a 1985 live album in little old Baton Rouge, right at the tail end of the golden era of nowhere music. We must've been someplace back then!

Anybody know where they played? Did Tächsläge open up for them? There are really no hilltops to look from here. Maybe that's why it sounds their hearts were not in it, though, it was the style to not have hearts back then.

♫ Section 25, "Looking From A Hilltop (Live Baton Rouge 2.2.1985)" (Rhapsody)

jackass/cliche

Living With Music: A Playlist by Rachel Kushner (PaperCuts)
John Lydon DJ'ing All Songs Considered (NPR)
Public Image Ltd., Live in Tokyo (Rhapsody)
Jarvis Cocker, The National Trust: Music to Think To (The National Trust)

I like that Bob Boilen hasn't listened to PiL in ages either.

I daydream of one day being asked by the New York Times or NPR to craft such a playlist, and have the daynightmare of sounding like a jackass/cliche in my commentary.

Speaking of cliches, this is one of the finest

♫ Public Image Ltd., "Public Image" (Rhapsody)

A girl in my high school circle was all into the Live in Tokyo record. Maybe because punk rock & new wave was available as scraps in the hinterlands in the 80's and somebody accidentally shipped a copy of this to the Record Bar at the mall. It's not my favorite PiL moment but us all slumped living room and the dark paneling and the smell of Domino's pizza and me giving a prickish, self-righteous cold shoulder to a guy that had recently been in an accident where he stopped his jeep on the train tracks and couldn't get the car started and the worst happened like they always warn you about, all comes rushing back with this is not a love song! this is not a loooooove song! railing in the background.

♫ Public Image Ltd., "(This Is Not) A Love Song (live)" (Rhapsody)

If you look dead center in the photo above, you will see one of the hawks that lives in our tree out front.

this information helps you

Suicide, American Supreme (2002, Rhapsody)
Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel, various tracks (MySpace)
Indian Jewelry, Totaled (out today)

American Supreme is not Suicide at its best. It hits me like Alan Vega was skulking around his loft nursing the idea that he created rap music and that a couple speed freaks in the vicinity egged this on: You did create rap music! and so Martin Rev was awakened from his hibernation chamber and summoned to make something now, theoretically for 2002's now, except that the only calendar in the loft was a Wax Trax calender from 1989, resulting with something that comes across as De La Soulless. And in that light, it's kind cool.

♫ Suicide, "Power Au Go Go" (Rhapsody)

Duet for Theremin & Lap Steel played in New Orleans last night. I didn't go. I realize this information helps you not at all now.

Natalie Elliot did a fine review of the Indian Jewelry record at the Oxford American site, spurring on this whole Suicide attack, and if you clicked on that site to open this page and then click on here to open theirs, you might tear the space-time continuum and that will only make Suicide do another record, so keep that in mind.

♫ Suicide, "Child It's a New World" (Rhapsody)

Meanwhile, above, the garden is attacking the pergola.

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.