I figured using this science museum picture was just for laughs when all of a sudden, a story about the immortal jellyfish, one that reverts back to polyp stage after maturing and grows up again and again and never dies, appeared on the feed. Synchronicity, like James Joyce was trying to tell me when I has having a twitterlaugh about Bloomsday yesterday. But yeah, when the damn things start filling up the remaining unpolluted parts of the oceans and the doomsday cults all discard their variations on the cross for multi-legged astericks on which to nail each tentacle of the immortal squishy plague, only to have it slide off the nails with a sickening, wet sound, well, who will be laughing then?
That Pernice Brothers record up there streaming on the Spinner is just loveliness upon the lovely. You should stop getting all worked up about apocalypse jellyfish cults (if you can) and listen to it. Not for nothing, as I type this, old Joe's going "I never wanna die, I never wanna die, I never wanna die..."
Listening to the new Tom Petty record Mojo is like getting around to the rest of one of those old Steve Miller Band records, except its made by someone a little cooler than Steve Miller. It would make a great soundtrack to that last Thomas Pynchon hippie detective novel I never finished reading.
I did wind up reading about Oulipo (from here) a French mini-movement who sought out mechanisms to generate writing and was moved to try my hand at a "snowball", a poem where each word goes on its own line, one letter longer than the previous line. It works unless the apostrophe disqualifies me.
I am not that great writer writers' tireless searching eventuates.
This cheery affirmation poem is in honor of the New Yorker 20 under 40 fiction issue sitting on my desk, and of my writing class tonight who gets to pitch stories at me, who should, like the story I linked to above does, have a better story sitting there in their back pocket should the first one not really take..
I feel valuable essences being drained away just by commenting on Work of Art, thereby exposing my vulnerable Bravo-watching side, but am a little compelled to defend Jamie Lynn's tableau of the lamp, vacuum cleaner and painting. The arrangement of objects was consciously boring, purposely so even, but the real meat of the piece, that maybe didn't get mentioned to the judges, was how the objects bled into each other having spent so long in a room together: the lamp cast a shadow on the painting while absorbing part of its image painted on the bell, the vacuum cleaned up part of the painted rug with traces of the image splayed on the side. Simple idea, kinda corny, but still, a smart piece.
If you need sanctioned references to tie into Jamie Lynn's piece, look to Tom Wesselman's painting assemblage work, some of Richard Hamilton's living room installations and collages and Flann O'Brien's surrealist novel The Third Policeman, where in one small village people have been riding the same bicycles for so long that they start to trade molecules with the bikes and take on each others personalities and traits. I think its the Third Policeman, if not, it's in Tristan Shandy, or even then not, it's a good idea. Hers the only piece taking to heart the "objects have a memory, a life" business (They do, mind you, but so what? Everyone has a story; it doesn't mean that it's a good story) being laid down by the famous guest artist who does corny rolling-TV-image-with-stuff-dangled-over-it art. Except maybe for the woman that made the TV full of objects buried in cement. That was a good one too.
I do appreciate the critiques on these shows because its one of the few places an expert opinion gets credence in pop culture. It makes you want to form expert opinions. Look how people talk about food now. Michael Pollan might be the voice of reason behind the New Foodie Jihad, but Top Chef is the muscle. C'mon celebrity judges, rip them a new one. But, though I fear I am being successfully manipulated by the show's producers to state as much, I'm on Team Jamie Lynn, y'all.
The celebrated piece by the delicate, damaged rager Miles was aesthetically pleasing in an IKEA/design magazine way but that's about it, and not any more or less than Jamie Lynn's. Hers is not the best piece of art I've ever seen or anything, but out of what was presented, it was sharp, concise, had a synergy with her materials that is crucial in assemblage art, unless you are trying to turn a pile of junk into a different pile of junk. And the conceptual haircut guy who worries about What Would Tom Friedman Say? should really worry about what Nam June Paik would've said about his TV-watching-other-TV's piece were he still with us. Paik was kind of a loose cannon and might have gone after him with a chunk of a busted violin or something.
OK, I am done defending staged art by made-up people on a highly choreographed reality show for now.
Nam June Paik, "TV Buddha" (1974)
Tom Friedman, untitled, 1999, soap and pubic hair, from here
There is a lot of useful information about writing in the interview with John McPhee in the next-to-most-recent Paris Review but the little phrase of which I cannot let go describes a quality he finds in writing he does not like: "Hot dog stuff." It took a couple re-readings to really know whether hot dog stuff is a good thing or not. The answer is not, but what a great term for things that detract from greatness.
More moody small-informs-the-big, big-becomes-small, post-rock mumble-rumblings. Another science museum picture. It's a circus up in here. A circus with great hot dogs.
Media Announcement: Adam Carroll, Justin Hilbun, Lil Ray Neal and avant-garde percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani all get the treatment in this week's Record Crate blog for 225.
"Working Girl" was the best song on MTV way back when
Bad Manners, for all the bluster of their ska image, or at least that of their front-clown Buster Bloodvessel, were sort of pop geniuses. For the record (sorry.) I like these kinds of videos very much.
Bad Manners, "Walkin' in the Sunshine"
James Chance is the opposite, a guy who unravels a pop song to display the buzzing wires and the rot inside. Enjoy! Here he saps all the irony out of James Brown's drug allegory.
James Chance & the Contortions, "King Heroin" + "Contort Yourself"
See? Jackie got a little syrupy but like Ray Davies said, nothing in this world is apparently going to stop me from thinkin' 'bout that girl. Except Belle & Sebastian. "Like Dylan in the Movies" from the collection of BBC radio sessions can pull me out of any possible trance. This version from some DVD also does the trick to only a slightly lesser degree.
Belle & Sebastian, 'Like Dylan in the Movies"
And who knew Prefab Sprout was still going all these years? 2009's Let's Change the World Through Music is equally cringey, unstylish, and epic a synthpop wonder as are all the great Prefab Sprout albums, which is kinda all of them. Was he always so God-dy though?
Prefab Sprout, "Ride"
I do know nothing in this world is going to stop me from thinking about the spinach lasagna at Zeeland Street Market with a side of mustard greens. It's like having a threesome except everything goes the way you want the whole time. And, is about greens.
I don't really think about Jackie DeShannon ever or singers like her. It's not that I don't like the music, what's not to like about it? I figure plenty of people are already thinking about everything everybody likes, people who think better things than I do probably, so my time and meager efforts are spent thinking about other things. Thinking is like mining to me; why chip away in the same ole shaft with the crew when there's gold in them thar hills.
But, I heard a bit of her being interviewed in Fresh Air last night, and they played "Splendor in the Grass" and talked about how the Byrds are the backing band, and it's not that much of a story. If, say, a less beloved group like the Association or whoever had been pulled in to back her up, or had it been countless unnamed session musicians and done as good a job, would it be something to moon over on national radio? I mean, it's very Byrdy and that might peck holes in my argument but what I'm getting at is that friction between the song and the song-maker. Is that friction what causes the spark? What's the good part anymore when you know all the parts? Is the song better for knowing all this, or is it clouded by it, and are we then left to the basest human impulse - to stare at clouds?
Really I'm not even so sure the song is that great of a song - it's a pretty shallow one about the movie - but that rumbling shudder of the bass and the tambourine and how she angles a little hesitantly into the Byrds perfect lazy harmonies.... That tambourine! Now I can't stop listening to this song and can't stop thinking about Jackie De Shannon.
