Good Morning, Spider

In a web across a driveway on the walk to her new school


Don't you wish these guys would battle in these things?

Sparklehorse, Good Morning, Spider

And melons

The plant in the living room assumes the Blue Öyster Cult position.

Whiskeytown, Stranger's Almanac
Richard Buckner, Impasse

I haven't listened to sweet old Whiskeytown since I reviewed the deluxe edition of this record back in 2008. In the same piece I like what I said about the renewable resource of the Elvis Costello's songbook: everything he does is going to be routinely turned like a retiree's spring garden. We amuse ourselves with ourselves.

I had a dream last night about going up in a balloon chasing after another balloon. We needed to catch that other balloon, like there was a kid in it, and my balloon pilot said it was the best way to catch another balloon. Anything else is too fast. I don't know if it means anything besides the obvious and shallow martyr/hero dream BS, esp. when I am actually not doing anything more heroic than being scared to death in a balloon and Facing My Fears. Dreams (like sleep dreams, not ambition dreams) are corny that way.

We toured my daughter's new school (starts tomorrow) at lunch and among its treasures was this tableau above the storage closet.



And a koi pond!



And melons in the garden! I wanna go to this school.



Been writing a thing about Richard Buckner and in the listening, I'd forgotten how pretty much of Impasse is.


Richard Buckner, "...& The Clouds've Lied"

Probably no coincidence

Probably no coincidence that in my feeder there was (in HTMLGIANT) Kenneth Anger's 1965 powder pink film Kustom Kar Kommandos




followed immediately (via MBV) by this equally pink picture of the Sea in Cake's Sam Prekop in promotion for his upcoming album Old Punch Card. Prekop's new song would fit well for an update to this film. I'm a little scared to check if they have the same running time.

stupid stupid dead atom

Well, u r.

Ornette Coleman, The Complete Science Fictions Sessions
Sufjan Stevens/OSSO, Run Rabbit Run
William Brittelle, Mohair Time Warp and Television Landscape

I am doing some last minute after-the-fact-checking for a piece that I am so squealy excited about that I think it's better I keep my mouth shut until it appears... but anyway, I came across the above enigmatically lettered notes in one of the texts. I actually never write in books because whatever I write is usually stupid and doesn't help me or the next poor slob obsessed with my current obsession. Plus, there is the tug to madly dash comments in the margins like Yes! or even simply ! and that kind of cheerleading only helps the author, who will likely never read your notes. I take pictures of text with my phone and if I was more indebted to my techno-cleverness, would invest in some OCR scheme to rip the text. I could pretty much write a Davis Shields book on the toilet with that set up.*

Anyway, I really like how the darker remark is further remarked in thin blue pen, perhaps by Prince (before the purple thing) during his undergraduate years studying experimental architecture (which would explain a lot about Prince).  I also like this thing on another page that blossmed a Seventies-child sweetness in my heart when I saw it.


The most fulsome description indeed!

I didn't give a rat's ass about sports and I still loved Muhammad Ali. My sister-in-law, who has amazing stories, like stuff that mere mortals do not, was once embarrassed by one of her children when he said "Tell him about when you met Muhammad Ali" and she was all, "Now why would he want to hear about that?" to which I still reply !

Also, while I'm talking about the writer business, I was thinking on the walk over to the library about an interview I have to do tomorrow. It's with someone for whom I have some ferocious admiration and was inventorying my anxiety about what I should ask and countered my own question with: well, what do you want to know?                                  !

* Maybe one of just margin notes and I'll quote the books in which they are found in a meta-referential way. Don't you dare go steal my idea; I called it!

unicorn full-gallop

Taken right before the Cloud Giants overstepped the horizon and destroyed mankind for its transgressions.

Mike Oldfield, Hergest Ridge

Jesus, Mike Oldfield... This week is having an auspicious musical start. I played the living shit out of my already played to shit used copy of Tubular Bells in that freshman dorm room circa 1988, not too long after my Beatles Semester and Pink Floyd Month and right before the Year of the Eno. I listened to it so purely and intently that it never occurred to me that it was the music from The Exorcist. I'm not sure how it took me twenty more years to gain any real appreciation for prog-rock with this background. I blame Throbbing Gristle, whom I got heavily into right after the Eno years, and I'm sure Genesis P-Orridge would be happy to know that s/he staved off someone's love of egregiously Baroque, elf dance music for as long as s/he did.

But wowzer, this second Mike Oldfield album, which I've never heard until now is what you get when you ride your unicorn full-gallop down the Road of Excess, desperate to reach the Palace of Wisdom before the Cloud Giants that have you in chase do when suddenly your steed ducks too quickly under a low slung branch of the Tree of Knowledge and you bang your head and are defenestrated from this dream only to land in a somewhat uncomfortable office chair, making comments regarding a reposting of an article about overrated writers and reading a Jonathan Lethem's interview bootlegged from the Paris Review and going, "Huh? He's a science fiction writer? And so is Thomas Pynchon?" and then you realize that David Foster Wallace is too and that everything good and true in the world is science fiction and then you might listen to that Ornette Coleman Science Fiction sessions collection again because you might as well at this point (also because you could never get into Skies of America no matter how much you wanted to)  and then The Eye backs away from the chair, through the roof , through the clouds, through the stretches of space and All Is Revealed.

let me start the generator

In order:

1. Sukie tried to eat a dragonfly but wouldn't show it off for the camera. 
2. The @TacoDePaco taco truck had its debut at Stabbed in the Art. For those who live in cultural non-wastelands, these two things may sound mundane, and really the art at the latter was on the whole with some exceptions I'll mention in a minute, but man, I have been wanting for ambitious student-y art shows and street food since I moved back here at the dawn of this century and they finally are kinda happening. The taco truck thing had its own drama: the guy announced "Two minutes; let me start the generator" to we queued and then promptly ripped the ripcord out of the generator. I considered testing the miraculousness of Twitter asking that a generator be brought to the scene pronto (it's hurricane season and there was probably half a dozen of them fueled up and ready to go within 100 yards of the truck at that moment) but the Entrepreneur got it started without soiling his nice shirt. Huzzah! I should point out that right in front of me in line (I was 3rd) was a mom desperate to kill the buzz of the thing and a dad looking to be disappointed but whatever-you-want-dear with a chirpy preteen daughter singing "So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night/I hate to go and leave this pretty sight" to herself any everyone and who said to the mom, "Just be patient and these tacos will be wondrous!" and with that, the truck was in business. I want this kid on my apocalypse team. She can be my Deputy Minister of Morale. Mom can register her many complaints about the Endless Winter with the cannibal hordes.
3. The tacos were wondrous enough to make me a convert though, truthfully, I was pre-sold. $2/per. They didn't have corn tortillas ready much to the mom's public and my internalized chagrin, but promise them down the line. The tacos have cute names. I recommend the Miguel (veggie) and the Juan (chicken).
4. The art was what one expects at these things. Young people of art: spend less time on your choice of sunglasses and little hats and kick out the jams. I have yet to see one of you unclothed or self-injured or smearing your crazy convincingly across a stretched canvas in the name of art and I don't like it. I did kinda like these sparkly numbers here and 
5. here, though someone needs to work on the tightening of one's canvases.
6. The closest thing to sublime were this little pieces by one Jay Bird where he feeds a web address into an algorithm (he explained what an algorithm is on the little card which I guess is necessary but ugh...) and out spits a satisfying little graph deduced from the ratio of text, images, and links. Tidy.
7. Skating to the new school which starts Wednesday.
8. The small thin catfish platter at Middendorf's. The actually do have the world's best thin fried catfish. I checked. The large platter is like Thanksgiving dinner large.
9. The scene across the street from Middendorf's. It is perched on a strip of land separating Lake Ponchatrain from Lake Maurepas.

commence the reception in a darkened gallery

They have Strawberry Cherry Escape at the Walgreens

The Connells, Darker Days
Lloyd Cole, Rattlesnakes
Robyn Hitchcock, I Often Dream of Trains 
R.E.M., Fables of the Reconstruction
The Windbreakers, Time Machine (1982-2002) (thanks for the suggestion, Jorda!)

More jangling and another (day)dream: an art show called Roots in the Earth, Kidneys in the Body after the acapella Robyn Hitchcock song "Furry Green Atom Bowl" and commence the reception in a darkened gallery with a spotlit choir singing the song with laser precision.



From I Often Dream of Trains

My high school friend Duke and I would break into it along with this other babrbershop number from that album.


"Uncorrected Personality Traits"

We also would bust out the raps from "Cool It Now."


"Ronnie, Bobbie, Ricky, and Mike/If I like a girl, who cares who you like?"