Thanks, Birdman!

In order: 1-3) Taking the bus to school for the first time! 4) Webinar! The future will be conducted by webinar, likely by speakers who keep their backs to the camera the whole time. 5) The future will unfortunately not be catered as well as retirement community webinars. Old folks care vehemently about two things: those in power using common sense for once and snacks. Bless the grandma who made the little sausage cheese biscuit drop thingies. 6) Birdman in St. Francisville has my book on rather prominent display. Thanks, Birdman! 7) Some serious drumline shit going down on my way to get a haircut. Right before this incident one of them stopped and pointed over my shoulder with his sticks. "Shit! A hawk!" 8) Poetry edging out Maxim at the barber shop while the Blue Collar Comedy tour rattled on the flatscreen. "Man, my daughter has this friend who's into that goth thing. Have you seen that?? I'm like we used to call that Halloween!" And that is how goths are made.

I've had Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble" rattling in my head all morning, particularly that these are the days of miracle and wonder and they are. I believe!


Remember the Blue Aeroplanes? Remember how they had that guy in the band that just danced?


Someone else doing it.

--> minotaurs

Susan Cowsill said we beat the shit out of Monroe on "Flower Girl". More at my YouTube Page.

Susan Cowsill, Red Dragon, Baton Rouge, 8/7/2010
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros, Rock Art & the X-Ray Style
No Age, Loosing Feeling
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story 
Hawkwind,  In Search of Space

Media Announcement: I sing the praises of  Susan Cowsill, her performance last week at the Red Dragon, and how we beat Monroe (see the above video) in the sing-a-long in this week's installment of my 225 blog, The Record Crate.

God, Gary Sheytgart will totally make you want to delete your  Facebook account. The delirious scenes of data streaming and rankings and people glued to devices in public places is so eerily familiar to my own life. While reading Super Sad on my lunch break I have two email accounts open on my two montiors* before me and my phone consolidating those two and two others on the table next to me, and when email shows up as a shudder in my peripheral vision - the same way dinosaurs saw prey according to Jurassic Park - I count the seconds until my phone buzzes, acknowledging its receipt of that message. I really have gotten only one email today worth reading,  the one Stephen Elliot of the Rumpus sends, and I replied back to tell him so. But ugh, this book makes me feel weak and unduly augmented by trivial things, like a robot made of junk, and I'd go take a quick walk to shake it off, but I have to go show someone how to work a video camera.

* I accidentally typed minotors --> minotaurs, multiples of the bull/man monster** of the Labyrinth of Crete that demands the sacrifice of strong supple men and virgin girls every year, only to be slain by the hero Theseus hiding among the offered. Super Sad is partially about a hapless book reader lost in post-Everything tailspin America, buoyed only by love, and I feel a little like him right now.


** It seems important to mention that in the myth, Theseus is a son of Poseidon and the Minotaur is the mutant offspring of a bull gifted to King Minos of Crete and the king's wife Pasiphaë,who was compelled by Aphrodite to fall in love with the bull. Bastard son is to battle the bastard object of the father's cuckolding in the maze which he had built by Daedalus and Icarus, the too-close-to-the-sun kid. Like that's how it always goes down.

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.