wait until Lucifer Rises

Kenneth Anger's film/commercial for Missoni

Maybe nobody cares about them any more but me, but I love Kenneth Anger's films. A lot. In my idealistic  college days I managed to help organize a screening of a worn VHS copy of his films (rented from a Blockbuster out in the suburbs) in the art school auditorium. People had heard of Scorpio Rising but were ultimately bored by it. I thought with sadistic glee, wait until Lucifer Rises! It takes even longer! 

Anyway, it appears the old devil still is kicking around and quietly making films like this little commissioned promo thing from the Missoni family to promote their fashion line. I haven't worn my experimental film nerd hat for some time so I might not be able to tell you what every little orgasmic splash of water or lick of flames means, but he's still got the stuff. Anger lives!

I've said it here before, but Invocation of My Demon Brother is my jam.


Kenneth Anger, Invocation of My Demon Brother. There is also a  version with commentary worth checking out.

juke joint tamales

Teddy's DJ booth. Photo by Frank McMains. It's like the Sign O' the Times cover come to life.

Matthew Dear, Black City
Gorillaz, Live in Damascus (streaming at NPR)

Media Announcement: My interview with Cohen Hartman, local song wizard turned label honcho turned recording engineer appears in the August issue of 225, hitting stands any second now.

I went out to Teddy's last night with a couple of friends to collect some sound and vision for a radio piece and its web counterpart. Nancy rustled us up some some juke joint tamales at 11pm on a Thursday. It's not a  bad life I have.


I shot this one.

If you cannot tell by contrast, Frank is a real photographer and I am a snapshotter. You should check out his site Lemons and Beans where he tries to take one good photo every day, and does. His food writing is totally on point as well.  Below is one he took of Swede, Teddy and myself, with Swede demonstrating his audio-gathering firepower. His arm has to be hurting by the time this was taken; Teddy's tells all of a story when he tells a story. I'm going to see into some funding to facilitate this crew to go with me everywhere I go. Ed. to add: I might budget for a copy editor as well.


Swede, Teddy, Me on the front patio at Teddy's.  Photo by Frank McMains

You LCD-oriented, post-disco niteclubbers out there, as well as you astute treadmill runners, should be on the lookout for the Matthew Dear record Black City in a couple of weeks. It's the business.

Come, Armageddon! Come!

The sky over the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College, among other things.

Richard Buckner, The Hill
End of the World: Joshua Cohen and Gary Shteyngart in discussion on Tablet
Morrissey, "Every Day is Like Sunday" (banjo version from The Late, Late Show, 2004) 
Keith Fullerton, Live Generators

Come, Armageddon! Come! 

In our building this morning, I ran the sound and video for a live webinar (that's web + seminar) targeted to high school science teachers. Shortly before broadcast time, a landscape crew set up a massive woodchipper, into which they loudly fed the decimation of two towering pine trees, right outside the window. The blackest part of my heart was all aflutter - this nice lady trying to tell a bunch of other nice ladies who'd either shown up and navigated the university's obscure parking procedure or were tuning in at home during the last vestiges of their summer, important but ultimately not-that-interesting information via the Internet Wonder was to vie for  attention with the oldest, most rickety woodchipper in the university's no doubt vast collection of rickety woodchippers. The rusted beast lurched to silence at one point and I peered out the window to see a guy half-hanging out the woodchipper's intake trough, banging on something inside to get it to work again. How do you not dare secretly wish for the worst to happen in a situation like that? Where would you point your camera in that situation? I felt a little sick with portent for what I thought I might have wished into happening. Then the roar or progress and the machine had been coaxed into running. Fortunately for all, no maintenance worker was eaten by machines that morning and the trees were stripped down to naked poles just in time for the webinar to commence and proceed without a hitch.

It's weird how it's vie and then vying. What about viing?

Check out that Morrissey video posted on my friends' site the Sound of Indie.  Then this. May God have mercy on our wretched souls.


Richard Buckner, live track from The Hill with Eric Heywood on lap steel. I saw them on this tour and it was devastating.

valuable hit points

Thou's fancy vinyl

Thou, Baton Rouge, You Have So Much To Answer For
NEU!, NEU! (Box Set)
Work of Art: The Next Great Artist
Joshua Cohen, Witz

Media Announcement: My better-late-than-never review of the oft-reviewed Sam Lipsyte novel The Ask is up at outsideleft.com.Much thanks to Sheila for her professional insight to the novel's subject of philanthropy that fired up this review.

I'm typing this before I even heard the result of this week's Work of Art, but had Miles built his little punched out wall room and Jaclyn had left intact her little gauze studio in which she painted her masturbation painting and put them side by side I think it would have been really smart, in a Louise Bourgeois way. I dunno. I feel valuable hit points being drained from my character when I talk about TV even though I watch a lot of it, more than I generally portray on here. We were just remarking that the cool thing about this show vs. Top Chef and etc is that we can actually tell the people apart, and that is a pretty low bar for quality.

Case in point: I am making fun of the Pit Boss commercial while watching Confessions: Animal Hording.

Witz is kicking into gear in Book II. Those bloops and bleeps from the future of 1971 via Krautrock band NEU! still sounds like the future now. I had a Creamy Limeade Chiller from Sonic and it was good y'all.

I dream all the time

The snack shop at the pool is out of fried cheese and macaroni 'n' cheese. It is also not open. Kinda like how the mosque at ground zero is not at ground zero, and is also not a mosque.

Dr. John, Swamp Blues
Grinderman, "Heathen Child"
Lil Wayne vs. the "500 Days of Summer" Soundtrack, (500) Days of Weezy

Media Announcement: I have a short piece on Nashville legend Marty Stuart in this month's OffBeat. I also sing the praises of Boris, the Coney Island Cockabilly Roadshow, and Rudy Richard in this week's Record Crate blog for 225 Magazine.

I've had these immense cinematic dreams this week and am each time shocked awake mid-action, so much so that I forget what's happened. I'm not sure what's bringing this on; my dream-life is generally compartmentalized off so that I don't remember it at all. I assume I dream all the time.

My former corporate life has been on my mind a lot lately, so that might have something to do with it. Pathetic fallacy style, this thinking of mine made Kanye West rap a capella in a blank conference room at Facebook HQ like those I remember at the Important Software Concern in the Pacific Northwest.


Kanye West at the Facebook conference room

I will say the Concern's meeting rooms had better lighting in our building, but maybe because ours contained the Media Conference Rooms. I remember one evening catching on the news a snippet of the Concern's rather public founder and CEO speaking from a room from which, hours earlier, I'd swiped some bagels from the buffet table.

That Lil Wayne mashup is worth the one half-listen you will give it, but when you pop it in at the right party this weekend, you will be king of the room. The closest thing to Zooey Deschanel there will totally make out with you until her friends say her name, and then someone will put something else on and the dream will be over. See if you can at least hang onto the moment until track 5, "Please, Hustler, Please" where Weezy raps over the Smiths. There's a Hall & Oates meets "Lollipop" number as well.

the dinosaur above and the birds below

There's that baby.

Los Lobos, Tin Can Trust (NPR freebie) and The Town and the City


Media Announcement: My story about the barn dances at Lakeview Park & Beach RV Park in Eunice, LA is up on the Country Roads site. Lakeview Park has quickly become one of my favorite places ever, and I haven't even done the beach part during the day yet.


Portrait of the family as a music room.

We've been big on the Ed Emberley drawing books this week. I used to get those from the Scholastic catalogs when I was in grade school. We all can draw already, but we were having competitions to see who could do the steps the best and that turned into posters that are turning our house into one giant Ed Emberley book, like the dinosaur above and the birds below. We are one craft project away from going all Esty on y'all's ass, so watch out.

We love each other.

Speaking of, check out this tour of the charming nightmare that is Etsy HQ.

It reminds me of when I once had a meeting in the Hallmark corporate offices, whose vast halls were smartly marked with an impressive contemporary print and painting collection. Like we had to turn right at a Christopher Wool to get to the IT department, which was labeled by a lilac hanging sign that looked exactly like the one that tells you where the candles are in an actual Hallmark. On each desk - made of the same blond, polished wood as the counters in the stores - no matter how geeked out were furnished with Hallmark junk: a lamp whose base is a baseball player, a line of miniature vintage auto models, shit-tons of stuffed animals. It took a second to understand that this was a conscious realization of Hallmark totality. It was both calming and anxiety inducing, that just-pick-a-card-already nervousness. I can only imagine the forced march of quaintness that is Etsy HQ.

Los Lobos kicks ass.

everyone involved is a Pharaoh

The Pharaohs, "Damballa"

The Pharaohs, Awakening
Funkadelic, America Eats Its Young

I read the Eric Mercury from the last post was a member of the Pharaohs but I don't think it was this Pharaohs, which whatever. Everybody in this band, according to one set of YouTube annotation (and what data besides that are we to trust in this world?) everyone involved is a Pharaoh.

LP: Awakening (1972, Scarab Records)

Bass, Cowbell, Vocals - Pharaoh Ealee Satterfield
African Drums, Tumba, Flute, Congas, Cowbell, Vocals - Pharaoh Derf Reklaw Raheem
African Drums, Tumba, Vocals - Pharaoh Shango Njoko
African Drums, Cowbell, Congas, Tambourine - Pharaoh Oye Bisi
Quinto Drum, Saxophone [Alto] - Pharaoh Black Herman
Trap Drums, Tumba - Pharaoh Alious
Engineer - Brian Christian
Engineer [Recording Engineer] - Stu Welder
Guitar, Lead Vocals - Pharaoh Yehudah Ben Israel
Mastered By - George Horn
Mixed By [Re-mix Engineer] - Roger S. Anfinsen
Saxophone [Alto, Tenor, Baritone], Flute, Cowbell - Pharaoh Don "Hippmo"
Trombone, Bassoon, Brass [Baritone Horn], Drums [Big Black Drum] - Pharaoh (Big) Willie Woods
Trumpet, Flugelhorn, Percussion, Vocals, Brass [Peck Horn], Woodwind [Africa Shawm] - Pharaoh Ki
Tuba, Tambourine, Brass [Baritone Horn] - Pharaoh Aaron Ifad Dodd

I'm not sure which sobriquet is better: Pharaoh Black Herman or Pharaoh (Big) Willie Woods. I'd be honored to live up to either. This Smokey Robinson cover speaks to the width of their light beam entering the Pharaohs' prism


The Pharaohs, "Tracks of My Tears"

and this one demonstrates how that light gets bent.


The Pharaohs, "Great House"

One of the great undersung Funkadelic masterpieces.


Funkadelic, "You Hit the Nail on the Head"

This just showed up out of nowhere, like I guess a rotary connection would do.


Rotary Connection, "I Am the Black Gold of the Sun"