Wow. It's not like me to re-report things like this but I have context. For my twelfth birthday, my mom took me to to see Gallagher in concert at the Saenger in New Orleans, at the height of his powers and it was the funniest thing I ever saw. I was rolling on the floor despite knowing all the jokes already. He was state-of-the-art participation comedy then - people brought rolls of Visqueen and raincoats - and I wore that teal Gallagher t-shirt until it was too small for me. I didn't really expect him to maintain velocity all these years, and I remember hearing about material theft by his brother touring as Gallagher II, but I was not prepared for the OG watermelon smasher to have become a paranoid, racist boor who turned his trademark act of timeless humor into
Then Gallagher gets a tin pie plate. He opens a giant can of fruit cocktail and pours it in. He opens a can of some Asian vegetable—water chestnuts, maybe—and pours that in, too. "This is the China people and queers!!!" he screams and takes his sledgehammer to the thing with a fury that is no fun at all.
Was he always like that and I just don't remember? Read more in this similarly pained realization in the Stranger if you dare, but it is a little like finding out Speed Racer was a Nazi or something. Speed Racer wasn't a Nazi, was he?
Dear old departed John Martyn will make it all better, deluxe edition style.
Not sure what message exactly this video is supposed to convey, or why "Adidas in Heat" was used as the soundtrack, but it is the kind of sense the 80s/90s made back then.
Adrian Belew, "Adidas in Heat"
Kinda like how this Stevie Wonder tribute thing makes perfect sense now. (HT to David "Gorjus" McCarty)
Media Announcement: My review of the Best of LSU Fiction collection is up at the Oxford American site. My outsize praise for it had to be whittled down for size but it is a much better read than the accurate but unavoidably insular, campus-gift-shop title implies. Speaking of the OA, should you find yourself near the sweaty regions of the Mississippi Delta this weekend, you should head to their Most Southern Weekend On Earth. I'd be there just to pretend I have any business hanging out with Peter Guralnick, but my maladies of late have knocked me off my rounds.
Awesome Man Vs. Nature Announcement:A seven-foot-long alligator waltzed into one of the buildings on campus yesterday, albeit a warehousey, down-near-the-river building, but still a building on campus. Gator! The subject comes up a lot in extra-Louisiana correspondence, so I'm happy to fuel the myth they are running around loose everywhere with the fact that they actually are running around loose everywhere.
Once I was teaching a class at an aluminum plant downriver and half my class was late/absent (typical at the plants, they have stuff to do and don't like to go to class) but they all trundled in giggling with a phone-cam picture of one of them holding open the mouth of a ten-foot alligator they'd found in one of the most assuredly contaminated cooling ponds around the plant. Contaminated alligator. Wrap your brain around that.
I'd forgotten how much I like the 80's Talking Heads/Pere Ubu upstager version of King Crimson until I heard a Mute Math song on the radio last night and was shocked it wasn't King Crimson. Adrian Belew was a brilliant frontman for those times - absurd against the grind, grinding against the abject. It succeeds where the Who sorta dropped the thread in 1978 with Who Are You.
The title song was playing on the radio at the pool last night and my friend Jack and I were discussing how anyone would write a song like that. It's not a bad song per se, certainly not the worst Who song, but who would sit down and write that song? The Who were always the greatest sort of train jumpers, firmly aping the trend with an eye on the next one, but "Who Are You" seems too much a crazy quilt. Wiki explaineth:
Who Are You was put out at a time when the two major camps of rock, progressive rock and punk rock, were conflicting due to their antipodal styles. Pete Townshend's compositions were written as an attempt to bring the two styles together.
Jack said he heard a radio interview with Pete Townsend once around that time (I am old but he is old as dirt) where he talked about going to a Sex Pistols show and that everyone there called him "grandpa" and spat at him and nearly ran him out of there and that really excited him, and then they played "Pretty Vacant" on the show, maybe for the first time on the radio in Gulf Shores, AL.
None of this factors into the plot or the understanding thereof in Witz, but I think everything else does.
Something about a small brown glass bottle and an eyedropper underscores being sick. I am under the auspices of a most sever earache which, even to this sufferer, sounds a totally pussy malady, but it is so debilitating and disorienting. It feels at first like a full size egg has been pushed into my head and then the bird hatching from therein is periodically trying to peck its way out. I need the salve of tinctures and whitey progressive funk to see me though. As my wife was dropping me off at work this morning, she reminded me of an appointment tomorrow and I said I thought that was Friday, and well, tomorrow is Friday, so I guess when Chicago asks if anyone really knows what time it is, I should just keep my mouth shut.
SPOILER ALERT ABOUT WORK OF ART
My girl Jamie Lynn got voted off Work of Art, maybe deservedly, but her biggest aesthetic and conceptual crime is that she clings to the perpetual adolescentization of adults that plagues us all. There is no reason to hold onto that youth when we can do so much more with the age we are now. Ryan's cool-guy-car-art was the worst. When you say, if you are the type to say, you can't judge art, I put his up and defy you to not decry its dumbness. See adolescentization, in his and really just about everyone on that stupid show - Miles and his naps, Jaclyn and the unbearable burden of her bod, that other guy and his girlfriend. It perpetually bothers me when art school kids don't do cool things. No one expects profundity, but dude, get your pampered spectacle on. Dare a little. Even the Real Housewives understand that and they are the most arrested developers possible.
The only one I really liked this round was Abdi's portrait of himself as a black NASCAR winner and he ruined it with confetti.
There are a bunch of good fireworks pics from the weekend in St. Louis, but this is my favorite. The instant of glare from a roman candle; it looks the moment where she was exposed to radiation and gained her superpowers. I like this one too.
My nephew Connor getting all Residential with the Fiery Eye. Note that this one comes with a large gauge nail so you can tack it to a tree or fence, but we let it spin out in the middle of Tony's cul-de-sac, nail and all.
I like how ghosts appear in the sparks
also I would be remiss if I didn't post the pre-fireworks buffet Tony laid out for us.
From the mustard sauce ribs to his wife Peg's mindbending homemade mac 'n' chesse, from match to firecracker, from sea to shining sea, America was celebrated in all its glory.
I-55 just south of St. Louis is demurely stunning. You get the sudden rise of granite and limestone, the crust of the planet casually displayed like pink flesh in a skater's gnarly scar. The trees and hills are unabashedly Rockwell/Kincade topped off with pink and white clouds the same color as church picnic jello salad.
I project this Keillor-esque, passive-aggressive, stifled ego onto the place quickly and defensively because I'm from here but not of here. I am of a place that can barely keep its hands off itself; fully, blindly enrapt with every mosquito-y patch of swamp, ever bowl of red beans, every shrimp boat viewed from every bridge stitching up every bayou and canal. Most people sensibly flee when some yahoo with an accordion shows up; we make a thing out of it and correct your pronunciation.
Midwestern self love is more like the reaction of a tight-haired housewife whose daughter's loveliness has been remarked upon: "Hm, she is a nice looking girl. Not much sense, though," turning back to making that jello salad.
Be like that if you must, breadbasket of my youth, but I lose my breath a little every time on this stretch of road and I'm OK with saying so.
My brother-in-law here in St. Louis says two things over and over: "Oh, Mary!" when one of the zillion kids or he himself expresses comic doubt about doing something, and "Here's the thing" as an expositional preface for nearly everything else. All moves and considerations are consciously and publicly processed in his manic cloud; ego and graciousness rubbed ruthlessly together to create a wondrous thunder or, as in last night's case, the most mind blowing surf and turf. The fading supply of pre-oil gulf shrimp met a Midwestern American steak crusted and grilled to perfection along side a seafood chowder which I wasn't sure was the best venue for crawfish but, here's the thing, it was.
He's also the uncle that can be counted on for fireworks. Here is my nephew C-Bone wielding a roman candle under his guidance
