Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby, Two-Way Family Favorites
Gaze into my tomato salad and you will learn all my secrets, for this is what I eat for lunch just about every day, along with a sandwich and a piece of fruit, and on the days that I eat lunch out, I wish I'd gotten tomato salad instead of what I ordered.
I am not a cover versions guy - I do not consider doing a clever version of someone else's song an artist's most noble goal, and I realize I might be alone in feeling this way, but it is how I feel deep in my tomato salad-fortified bones. So how surprised was I when I finally held my nose to hear this CD by sorta folkie Amy Rigby and sorta punker Wreckless Eric do that very thing - they do warhorses like "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" and "Fernando" - and it is genius. Radiant. Enamorable. A really good record. I wish I could share their doing the Who's "Endless Wire" or Tom Petty's "Walls" with you because they kill, but you'll have to suffice with them winding up guitar cables and doing Johnny Cash. Simple, but simply right.
Each morning while I get dressed for work, I set my phone down on the cymbal of Maya's drumkit (our house is an old one built before the modern need of Copious Storage Everywhere and my clothes are in the music room and... nevermind) hoping that the vibrate will go off. I have a million notices set to the same vibration: incoming email, incoming texts, incoming Facebook comments, news alerts, my turn in Scrabble, etc. My phone, busy little bee, never stops vibrating. It has buzzed at me three times so far while typing this.
I set it on the cymbal because I want it to go off and rattle the cymbal, giving the myriad communication tethers I have with this world a momentary grand flourish. Instead of the dull plastic buzz, I want the world's missives to zzzzzzzing, to slooooooosh, but it never happens. No one needs my attention at 7:15 A.M. CST evidently, except this morning. I was shocked from half-awakened-ness to a polite yet tactile crrrrrriiiiiiinnnnng! from a text from one of you dear readers. The spalsh of sound matched the tone of the message perfectly, small and kind and sweet. I like when things work out that way.
It made me think of Alvin Lucier's Music for a Solo Performer, where amplified brain waves cause percussion instruments to rattle and hum.
It made me think of Walter Cianciusi's Email Sonata for Alex V. Cook, a conceptual music score I wrote on a Fluxus mail list years ago that composer Walter Cianciusi graciously realized. (available at UBU Web) According to Walter's interpretation:
[It] uses exclusively the default Outlook Express (Microsoft) sound for signaling the incoming mail. Performed for the first time by the composer Alex V. Cook, the score prescribes a repeated post of email messages from an account to the same account (an autoreferential system). The musical results (greater or minor density in time of the sound) can vary according to the simultaneous presence of users on the server in a particular moment.
Also, it made me think out the big meaning in the book I'm reading, Kate Mendelsohn's American Music, which has as one of its fiction components cymbals but moreso, touch and resonance, so thanks for that too.
Media Announcement: I sing the praises of These Children, Phosphorescent, the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana and the Incense merchants in this week's Record Crate blog for 225.
I am wiped out from teaching this video game design class this week, though I really like my students. A few of them are acolytes in the Way of the Code and therein may actually become producers of the things they want as opposed to mere consumers of them. I'm gonn try to go swimming later. Outside of that, I got nothing.
Oh, I do have something. Justice Yeldham. He's a noise artist who makes an ungodly racket by pressing a piece of glass against his face and making noises. The vibrations are picked through a contact mic on the glass and then run through a bunch of effects pedals on his belt and then amplified for no doubt, baffled audiences. I don't know if it's good - that might not exactly be the court in which this guy is shooting hoops - but it is also an example producing the results you want, however curious the means.
I'm more than a little heartbroken over news about the fire that destroyed Nunu's/Town Market Centre in Arnaudville, LA over the weekend. Loved that place. Town Market Centre was (and I guess still is) a key place in my book in how it balanced maintaining tradition with revitalization. My thoughts go out to George and his crew in hopes that they find a way to rebuild, and understanding if they don't. I did a story on it for Country Roads back in 2007 that I couldn't find it online so here is the unedited copy. Here's the pics from that trip as well.
Making a New Tradition at Nunu’s George Marks and the experiment in Arnaudville.
When we talk of attractions, we like to think that they are naturally occurring phenomena waiting there for us to discover them. That’s the perverse, egotistic joy of exploration: think some roadside restaurant or perfect riverbank or stretch of scenic highway has been just sitting there, muddling along waiting for us to happen along and complete the circuit. It’s a fallacy, of course, but one that works in everyone’s favor.
The truth is, most destinations come about as a mix of happenstance and determination. Someone has a place, an idea and then the river flow of the Universe turns it into what it will eventually become or washes it away. We, the travelers, are part of that river, with each paddle stroke, each time we pull over to shore, we help direct that river.
There is something to find at every destination for good and bad. On my way to Arnaudville to check out the scene artist George Marks has set up, I stopped at the Tiger Truck Stop in Gross Tete to witness the “live tiger exhibit” I’ve seen advertised from the highway for years but have always been too afraid to stop at. The truck stop is just that, a fuel-up station with a staggering assortment of beef jerky available at the counter, which would make it a favorite in my book were it not for the tiger pacing in the cage exposed to the elements, out between the trailer of trucker showers and the frontage road. It’s a painful tableau to witness, and while I have no doubt that the tiger is adequately tended to and cared for, this is the kind of attraction I can do without.
George Marks’ complex in Arnaudville is more what I was after. It started when the artist moved back to his hometown as a pit stop on his way to New York, and never left. He opened his gallery/studio in a building right on Highway 31, just before the bridge across Bayou Fuselier, titling it Town Market Centre. They opened a kitchen in the back (serving beer, wine and delicious pressed sandwiches. I got the grilled pork and despite the order from my taste buds, I couldn’t finish it) and started booking Cajun and roots bands in the cavernous main room, and Nunu’s was born.
The place has a smart, theatric yet homespun design that sets it apart from any Cajun dance club I’ve been to. Artwork from Marks and some of the other artists adorns the walls, and the dance floor, with its track light perimeter and black background is weirdly glamorous. “Preserve, promote and perpetuate, without becoming a theme park” Marks says of his club. “We want to be true to the area without being contrived.”
The locals seem to buy in. Nunu’s holds a table de Français on the last Saturday of every month for French speakers of all ages to meet, and gossip. “We had 73 people signed in.” says Mavis Frugé. “L.J. Melancon brought in his accordion and Louie Michot brought his fiddle and we had an impromptu performance.” This kind of spirit permeates the way Marks runs the business. “We had one group come in that asked if they could have a mandolin player join in on their Cajun group. I said, ‘Sure, why not?” and it was a hit with the audience.”
The truest test of community acceptance was passed that evening when the Lost Bayou Ramblers kicked in with their first waltz, the dance floor immediately filled up. I saw a number of familiar faces from other Cajun dance clubs in the area, mixed with a lot of younger people, some barefoot some in cowboy boots but all moving in that beautiful way the accordion commands of its listeners. The Lost Bayou Ramblers mirror Nunu’s in a lot of ways, they are definitely steeped in the traditions of where they are from, but they have a more playful, relaxed approach to it. Cajun bands often seem like they are trying to out-tradition each other, catering to the hotshots on the dance floor, but the Ramblers’ rhythms hover more toward mid-tempo, and was frankly more inviting than I’m used to. At one point, a line dance broke out with some joining in while others orbiting in two-step formation. It was a beautiful sight.
Marks says that Nunu’s and Town Market Centre is set up for possibilities. “We are talking about building a big screened in porch out back, and possibly having some floating kitchens out on the bayou,” he says. “One of our regular performers has mentioned wanting to barbeque out back, and I can picture him entering the dance floor discarding his apron and chef’s hat and taking his place on the stage. We are always trying to encourage people to do something they wouldn’t normally do.”
Last night I went to an Irish Film Festival held at Phil Brady's, a blues bar walking distance from my house, so I walked. I do like walking to a bar, but I like walking home even more. The combo unease of the dark + making use of the evening's special on Guinness makes it adventurous. The locus of the evening was my dear departed friend Terry Kennedy's unfinished documentary on Angola prison. Terry explained to me once that he used experimental editing and it does: scenes collide into each other mid-story, the voices sometimes are garbled beyond recognition.
The real meat of the thing though, were these extended slow-motion stretches of the infamous prison rodeo. They are shot from the bleachers with the support columns for the roof rendering the images as diptychs and triptychs in sync with the drama of stumbling prisoners and a batshit angry bull, all moving through the molasses of Realization. During one part where he watches an ecstatic gospel concert unfold, I swore I saw one person up in the stands who, in shadow looked like an A superimposed against the sky, and another couple sitting together that looked like an N. I probably could've found the rest of ANGOLA had I kept looking.
A number of stories by aging prisoners rattled off were accompanied by a distant din of wind chimes - for whom the bell tolls, perhaps and hallways and cells were shot with a lean to the left, as if the camera were becoming too much of a burden to keep straight under such narrative weight.
It goes on, much like the filmmaker would, but I think the hypnotic, even monotonous segments might be crucial in trying to imply the truth of prison. I'd sen most of it, or at least one version of it, with Terry when he was still alive. He was concerned about the editing; it apparently had put his impromptu test groups to sleep. I told him I thought that was a good sign - we are lulled into complicity with things like law and justice and the obscured mechanics by which they are run. No one fell asleep last night anyway, so that's something.
Got some really encouraging feedback on an article submission this afternoon, so we'll see. Also, because of that damn Nick Drake/fake-Christo & Jean Claude AT&T commercial, I have had it in my head to do a version of "From the Morning" except with brushed drums and cymbals replacing the guitar part. I don't know where the idea came from, but I have been walking around with it burning a whole in my potentiality. I do have a drumset at home... I don't know if this is a good idea, but ideas are good for something even when they aren't.
Here is Nick Drake impersonator Nicked Drake doing a more faithful version.
I know it's a terrible picture but the above accurately paints the scene of a backwoods zydeco club like Club LA in Cecilla, LA. The only light was a bare bulb over the pool tables in back and a clamp-on work light over the shots bar set up by the band in the murky distance, cut beautifully here by an old man rooster-walking the bar in a cowboy hat. Squint hard enough and you can see the five or six tension cables strung over the empty dancefloor holding the place together. The particular occasion was the dance after the Ropin Pen Riders's trail ride, which I did not attend because I don't have a horse. All I got to say is the soft jam zydeco variant provided by J. Paul Jr. and the Zydeco Nubreedz might be my favorite kind. A keyboard and a modicum of booty call harmony goes a long way to extend the loveability of the old chank-a-chank. More dark pics.
Chubby Carrier
We also hit zydeco longtimer Chubby Carrier & the Bayou Swamp Band at the Blue Moon in Lafayette, a markedly more kinetic take on the music. His washboard player is hypnotic to watch. More of that scene.
The evening was a living counterpoint between black Acadiana and white, how a single peculiar thing like zydeco is fractured on that point and channeled in radically different ways. My buddy Clarke and I were struck that at the two bars we visited, within 30 miles of each other, involved in the same music yet there was so little crossover. We wondered if anyone at either place had even heard of the other, much less been there. It's also the kind of evening that makes one look at how racist one actually might be (speaking for myself) making such deductions and broad assumptions, which is good too. The closest similarity between the scenes I could see at both was there were accordions involved and each cost $10 to get in.
The next day I was reading American Music, the new Jane Mendelsohn book (I've never read the old one though a lot of people have, I guess) in the blinding heat beside the pool, wearing down the vestiges of my earache. It's good (both the book and the earache, in varying degrees); about the evocation of stories/false memories/alternative realities through human touch and while reading it, I got a sudden flash to call someone I hadn't spoken to in some time. I used to think this kind of impulse was a throb of the collective nervous system, an autonomic response that one should heed immediately but have learned that, no, these things just happen and you should stay the course and besides, my phone battery was giving out. I couldn't if I wanted to.
Then, on the last shaded part of that battery I checked Facebook and saw that very person, out of the same shade of blue, responded to a post about the very scenes depicted above. A little freaked, but not too much, I dogeared the page and got in that pool, earache be damned.
Independent of scene and my place in one, I cannot get enough of the new Peter Case record.
