the liking of America, especially bald eagles

One of my contact in Conway, AR confirmed this guy did run for school board there. NSFW, but SF America!

Max Tannone, Doublecheck Your Head: Beastie Boys vs. Beastie Boys
Beck, Guero
Nico Muhly, I Drink the Air Before Me


Joseph Beuys' "I Like America and America Likes Me." The video snapshot reminds me of a certain record all about America and everything else, so that's how the afternoon will play out.


Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime



Minutemen, "Theatre is the Life of You"

Welcome to the LSU Center for Conceptual Art

Welcome to the LSU Center for Conceptual Art!

It started easily enough with a Facebook meme drill, where I did actually listen to the Nick Drake record (and had him fronting the Bad Seeds) and the John lee Hooker

1. Richard Youngs - Sapphie
2. Pearls Before Swine - The Use of Ashes
3. Nick Drake - Bryter Layter
4. Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
5. Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 - Equinox
6. Juana Molina - Segundo
7. Ogurusu Norihide - Humour
8. Suicide - Second Album
9. Arab Strap - The Week Never Starts Around Here
10. Nick Drake Cave and the Bad Seeds - Tender Prey
11. John Lee Hooker - Urban Blues
12. Funkadelic - Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow
13. Sun Ra - Space is the Place
14. The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
15. Yes - Fragile

and then went into this kidney punch of  "A Love Letter to Elvis Costello" in The Paris Review, after which, once I dredged all the hummus out of tall used sour cream container with my fingers, it all went Astro Black. Thanks, Paul.



and now I'm all like this:

Dub Kweli by Max Tannone

Who knows what the future holds?

man vs. instrument vs. material vs. himself

Another aspect of Fleur de Lis' neon signage: ellipses.

Justin Townes Earle, Harlen River Blues (via NPR)
Yoko Ono, A Story from Onobox (Disc 6)

Media Announcement: I have an unabashedly enthusiastic fan's profile of Richard Buckner in this month's Country Roads, in accordance with his appearance at the Shaw Center's Hartley/Vey Studio Stage September 14. Don't worry, I'll remind you.

As a diversion, [Buckner] hid out in a Bakersfield hotel (formerly a hunting cabin at the end of an airstrip built by Howard Hughes, no less) with the book he had with him, Edgar Lee Masters’ "Spoon River Anthology," a guitar and a four-track recorder. There he set the darkened vignettes of small town drama to song, and then moved on. It was years later when the tape was recovered and finished as The Hill, a stunning tour-de-force of man vs. instrument vs. material vs. himself. The songs dip and lace back into themselves, getting tighter and tighter to the point of strangulation and then suddenly let go.

Also I have a piece in the forthcoming Oxford American "Future of the South" issue hitting discerning newsstands everywhere real soon. I will likely remind you of that too when the time comes.

I've had the Onobox on my computer for ages but I don't think I've gotten to her cornball mid 70's aggresso-balladry (see Lou Reed Transformer through Sally Can't Dance) until it popped up on inadvertently and I'm into it. It suits her non-screaming side - a little lounge act-y, a little empowering, a little wonderful, a little terrible. It's helping me formulate the Justin Townes Earle interview questions I have on my to-do list.


Yoko Ono, "A Story"


Ed. to add: I'd totally put "O'Oh" on your mixtape and if I were smart, I'd lie about who it was and tell you after you heard it.

come on, baby, let the river roll on

Waiting for a pizza from Fleur de Lis Friday night. I am not that guy at the window. I am the one wearing a damp towel wrapped around damper swim trunks behind the camera.


This red glowing sign says "TELEPHONE TAKEOUT." It differentiates this window from the one where golden era Baton Rogeans ordered their pizzas by telegraph.


The blue says "AIR CONDITIONED"; the red, "ROMAN."


Then on Saturday, a thing got moved in a house and a sweet, dumb dog was totally confused.


Church barbecue was acquired for lunch. I got the "meat plate."


Maya made a catfish and cheesy spaghetti sandwich and offered me a bite. Thank you, indeed.


Then onto the OA block party thing in the 9th Ward with Little Freddie King


and the ubiquitous Rebirth Brass Band. The fact that Rebirth is the band that shows up everywhere reminds me of what a special place this all is.


The light was gorgeous down there after the rain. The party was to celebrate the release of Dave Anderson's One Block, a photo essay about 5 years of this corner since Katrina. I saw a pit bull, lovingly featured in the book, knock a  little kid down to take his hot dog and then cavort in the mud. The most commonly uttered remark from among my crew and myself and those with whom I spoke was that five years and one week ago, we would have never stepped foot in this part of the 9th Ward, such was the neighborhood's reputation. We're awesome about things sometimes.


Like I said, the light was unreal.

Unpictured: The karaoke breakdown at the Kingpin. I will never hear "Purple Rain" or "Shout" from The Blues Brothers the same way again

Also unpictured: the amazing tacos from the Taceaux Loceaux truck (@TLNola)


Among the simpler pleasures of Sunday at home, there was a hummingbird


and then it was gone.

This was all done while Cotton Jones, Tall Hours in the Glowstream purred its slow jams from the prom of the Angels. It hasn't quite torn me apart like Paranoid Cocoon did last week, but it has a rip going. There's this one song whose chorus goes "come on, baby, let the river roll on" which is the general tack I'm talking with this Katrinavale Disasterversary. Here was my take at the time. Obama lost points on his NOLA (y'know, it was never widely called NOLA, written or spoken, before The Storm) visit by still kicking around the phrase "natural disaster" in regards to it, but gained points with a poboy stop at Parkway Bakery. If he wanted to do it right, he'd've made his feel-good speech to the brave people of NOLA with a conspicuous roast beef jus stain on his American tie.

I also read a lot of Gert Jonke's The Distant Sound this weekend, and I'm kinda ready to get through with it. It's good, and a third of the thing is pointlessly dogeared with "oh this part!"'s but man, Eastern Europeans sure are all bound up about trains and circus magic = escape from tyranny. After a girl walks a tightrope strung through a train car, takes it down and than walks the memory of a tightrope, this is observed:

But it is as if Daniele has been swallowed up by a suitcase again. The director is right, you think, one day she may climb up through the air on the rope ladder of her imagination, all the way to the trembling flashing weather intersections on the shores of the atmosphere.

Speaking of part, this morning I'm listening to the new Arvo Pärt, Cantique, via NPR Music, and his is a gorgeousness so simplified and serene and distilled that you figure it is probably there in the background of everything all the time if you'd just listen.

Twice I typed wondow instead of window and I like the sound of wondow (window + wonder) but it is really too corny to use.

blinking "01"

You know what's a good record? Elephant Shoe is a good record.

Arab Strap, Elephant Shoe (most of which is in the YouTube playlist above)


When I got my first little mp3 player - a Rio something from Radio Shack that could hold 100 songs if you ratcheted the quality down;  a two-digit track number its sole readout - one of the first albums I put on it was this one and I would skulk the office in Kansas City silently with "Cherubs" throbbing from therein, blinking "01" at me.

I was walking up this huge spiral staircase they had, exhausted from overwork and a relatively new baby and saw the first snow fall against the massive atrium windows to "I see cherubs swarming all around..." and a heartbeat.

I can taste the cheese fries at the terrible little bar where we ate lunch nearly every day. I remember one guy had a motorcycle with a sidecar and we tore off to that bar in it one day. Riding in a sidecar is so weird because you turn laterally, like no lean into anything. It was like being on the turn of a conveyor belt: straight ahead... pivot....straight ahead. Another guy was a stock car racer and he had removed the interior door panels and glovebox and most of the dash to make whatever souped-up piece of shit he drove lighter, and it was a much more terrifying a ride than the sidecar. My own car had exhaust problems and developed a habit of stalling. I ended up driving to lunch one day and a co-worker told me he was too scared to ride back with me and within days, we got a new car. Something about the winter on the Kansas/Missouri line promotes ignoring the shoddy state of one's conveyance through life. You're just happy to get there.

I remember walking all the way to the Starbucks through the crunchy ice, at least a 20 min trip each way along the vast arc of a slippery sidewalk in the neighborhood behind the building a with Elephant Shoe going and someone was on the far end of the parabola coming this way and we met at the middle and it was really weird. We smiled weakly when we passed. It's what planets do on long, slow orbits.

Ha-ahhh-ahhh-ahhha-ah-orses!

Awesome video for "Judy and the Dream of Horses."

Belle & Sebastian, "Judy & the Dream of Horses" and Dear Catastrophe Waitress and Belle & Sebastian Present: Books and The Life Pursuit

Ha-ahhh-ahhh-ahhha-ah-orses!

I am all stuck up in some Belle & Sebastian this week. I don't even think "Judy" is a particularly good song in the details, but a great song on the whole.

Tangentially connected, ("Books") I really like this promo video for Patrick DeWitt's The Bastard. It reminds me of the animation in the original Wild Wild West show. I can't wait for the Internet to be about books instead of cats. (via Bookninja) Also via them, and book nerd Internet-y, the Man Booker Prize app for the iPhone is totally unnecessary and biblio-precious and exquisitely tight. And free. Like ha-ahhh-ahhhh-ah-orses!

why I like what I like

Maybe it's like how you can't easily take a picture of fireworks. These were shot off in honor of my buddy Lance's daughter's birthday last weekend, and now here it is his birthday. Happy birthday, you old bastard!

Page France, Hello, Dear Wind
Cotton Jones, Paranoid Cocoon 
Gert Jonke, The Distant Sound  
Owl & the Pussycat, Owl & the Pussycat 

Media announcement: I suggest you go out to Teddy's this weekend for an all star blues jam benefit for Sherill Jackson as suggested by my most recent post on The Record Crate.

I'm really smitten with this Cotton Jones album of 2009, as I am of this album by their former band Page France of 2005. I suspect Cotton Jones' album of 2010 will smite me similarly when I get my ears on it.

The Distant Sound is joining a group of books that I enjoy without really knowing what exactly is going on. I tried explaining it and the pleasures I extract from its ilk to my well-read and sensible wife and she said it sounded awful. It might be. It's making me question why I like what I like which is probably good for something. I compared it to abstract painting, something we both adamantly like, but I don't think that's it because abstract painting is visceral and immediate when it works and in abstract literature (a terrible term that I won't use again) the good stuff comes on like a fever dream epiphany after spending too much time in the sweat lodge. Which, when I say it like that, still doesn't sound all that fun.

Ed to add: Cotton Jones made me think of Owl & the Pussycat's song  "Don't Play Me" which once made me drop everything and run out and go someplace to buy the album. Like, "Excuse me. I gotta go do something." That's when you know you like something!