Wonders

Hare Krishna grapes.

Joshua Cohen reviews Tao Lin's Richard Yates (via Bookforum)

Wells Tower, "The Landlord" (via The New Yorker)
Of Montreal, False Priest (via NPR)
Nico Muhly, Speaks Volumes (via Bandcamp)

It is interesting to have the hyperverbose it-boy (Cohen) review the nearly comatose one (Lin) and have the former propose to do it as the kind of stunt for which the latter is famous, and have the latter refuse. For what it's worth, I reviewed both and found the former's book a dazzling mountain of language, but the latter's a book with a stronger lingering impact. I'm sure I've remaked before that Nico Muhly has it figured out. I may have figured out that I don't reallky like Of Montreal all that much anymore, even though I dig what he's doing. Wells Tower has the stuff. He does with aridness what Breece D'J Pancake does with things cresting hills in the night (fog, rabbits, car lights). Wonders, that's what they do with them.


Nico Muhly, "It Goes Without Saying."

intact meteorite

The parking lot of Club LA, Cecelia, LA.


Breece D'J Pancake, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
Cotton Jones Basket Ride,  The River Strumming
Cotton Jones, Paranoid Coccoon and Tall Hours in the Glowstream

I really thought I wanted to listen to Black Sabbath all morning before I got here, but turns out I wanted to listen to Cotton Jones, particularly their lo-fir-er, even dreamier side as Cotton Jones Basket Ride. These guys are kinda my favorite band right now.



I've been reading The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake with an acolyte's fervor, but it is wearing on me same as this flu, as this post. I wish I had a bowl of that Hare Krishna bitter melon before me right now to correct my humours. Pancake is an intact meteorite like Charles Bukowski or Barry Hannah, touching on a part of your soul that had before reading them quivered in you eager and unmolested, but once you are seven stories into the collection, you feel like you've moved into the trailer and there's no beer in the fridge. Collections of short stories are perhaps not meant to be read straight through unless concocted for that reason, and these weren't. Once you read them, you want to wait ten years and smile when someone else gets hit by it. And there's just the one collection, and he's long dead, arrived dead to most people I expect, and so there will be no ghastly revival. The collection sort of a total exquisite bummer, but wow, it's good.

Mused by Skeevy during a pool game sometime after the cockfight in "The Honored Dead":

    I rub my hand across my face, hang my arm tight against the back of my neck, think I ought to be at home asleep with Ellen. I think, if I were asleep with Ellen, I wouldn't care who won. I wouldn't count or want to know what the signals mean, and I wouldn't be some dog looking for something dead to drag in.

from Soft Rock Renegade.

"ISKCON MISSISSIPPI"

Statue of ISKCON Founder-Acharya: His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in the temple at New Talavan, Carriere, MS

Faust, Faust IV
Embryo, Rache
James Blackshaw, All is Falling
Neu!, Neu! '86

I went out to partake in the weekly feast at the Hare Krishna temple at New Talavan outside of Carriere, MS this weekend under the auspices of writing a story that won't appear in print for a couple of months, so I won't ruin it for you, but suffice to say the experience was a thorough pleasure. I've always enjoyed pleasant dealings with ISKCON devotees in the past despite what reservations I might have about their religious organization. It's not entirely directed at them; I have reservations any time religious and organization are in the same room. The vegetarian fare was amazing - like really, I've had Hare Krishna feasts before that were kinda bland but this was explosive. Bitter melon cooked just right will cure what ails you.


As will panir (fresh cheese) made from that morning's milk from cows that are lovingly treated by quiet men with a religious calling to do so. Seriously, its one of the freshest cooked things I've ever eaten.


One of those quiet men.

My photos can be found here, but there was a real photographer in tow and hers plus my more focused observations will appear when the article appears. I was hoping to find a t-shirt simply emblazoned "ISKCON MISSISSIPPI" but this was the closest thing.



But I really don't wish to mire the experience with kitsch redcutionism. It is a truly lovely place run by lovely people.




Three temple views, outside and in.

I usually go Kraut/prog/fusion on the soundtracks for trips like these, I find sonic excess (if you have to call it that) opens up my head on the dull expanse of highway the way a good conversation with a passenger does, but really, nothing in my arsenal can hold its own with the mid-day arati, where devotees gather to honor the deities and chant and play tabla and ring bells and put their hands in a flame and by the end, make a thunderous noise. Video will be posted once it's processed. For my out-music nerd readers, tabla and a harmonium sit waiting for eager ecstatic hands.


I was tempted.

So glad they saved the trailer

OK, Mr. Breece D'J Pancake, I am fi'in to get with you. Not in a great beyond sense - he died in 1979 from a self-inflicted shotgun wound at age 26 - or in a  git wit u sense, which would be creepy given the aforementioned circumstances, but in a figure what The Published You is all about way. Like all pancakes, I expect to enjoy the syrup I bring to the meal but it will be the heft of your grain that will sustain me afterward. Which still sounds creepy.


Still working on the juke joint book. If you know of a place in Lake Charles I need to visit or anything in north Louisiana, holla, please.  Above is the Alligator Bayou Bar, which unfortunately shut its doors before it could be memorialized in bound print. Here is the story I wrote about it for Country Roads, wherein a girl cries and a pissing tiger is discussed.


The latest news at the LSU Center for Conceptual Art Studies, besides the name change, is that the committee met and we went with "green."



2006; 2010. So glad they saved the trailer. In case I didn't get it across already, I wrote a piece about this very dome and my take on the R. Buckminster Fuller Thing in the most recent Oxford American, their "Future" issue. I haven't seen a paper copy yet either, but I have an online subscription thingy that allows me to read it from everywhere and it looks tight from all those angles. Get it? Geodesic...angles.... In THE FUTURE, Y'ALL!

This nuclear thing

Japanese wrestlers acting out a Super Mario skit. Thanks, Chuck!


OK, this started out as a nice story about the world's largest bass drum but then I got to this

During the 1940s, scientist Enrico Fermi worked on the Manhattan Project in the stadium, creating the first nuclear chain reaction. The atomic bomb research left the big bass drum radioactive.

The first nuclear chain reaction was set off in a Chicago football stadium? That seems a little unwise. Didn't they all secretly think splitting the atom would summon the frost giants to Ragnarok, just like I know in my heart Buzz Aldrin was thinking there was gonna be some fine-ass moon maidens up there and he was prepared to cockblock Neil Armstrong if need be? I got your giant step for man right here!, I feel he smugly mused as he clutched the crotch area of the space suit.  This nuclear thing will be common knowledge to some, at least to one or two dear readers with ties to the Big Shouldered Hog Butcher Town, but, trip on that!

In other news, I was looking up something about the Kinks last night on Wikipedia - I couldn't remember if it was Arthur (or the Decline of the British Empire) or Arthur (and the Decline of the British Empire); it is the former- and saw mentioned the Mike Cotton Sound as a related group and thought, "Now! They don't name them like that anymore!" Flugelhornist Mike Cotton and crew backed up everybody including the Kinks in concert and on records and lost a drummer eventually to them (via the Animals) and occupy the perfect nexus between wholesome and maddening music with their homage "Beau Diddley." You should play it at the same time as the Japanese Super Mario wrestling skit above and let your brain explode so you can fucking relax for the three day weekend already.


JimmyTheFerret, please keep shooting videos of your record player forever!

Serpents rarely improve a situation

Just like a rainbow in the dim!  Taken the other day walking from from the bus.

Kreutzer Quartet, Gloria Coates: String Quartets 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8
Blue Water White Death, "Song for the Greater Jihad" (via MBV)
Nortt, Galgenfrist

Gloria Coates is a sweetheart with her ear pressed to the window going, "Will ya listen to those sirens!" BlueWater White Death is the guy from Xiu Xiu and the guy from Shearwater and thereby a win in my book based simply on roster, but the song, it glistens with tranquility and brutality. It reminds me of a couple years back when I had pneumonia or something, I was sitting in the bathtub listening to Danish ambient black metallist Nortt howl from his crypt through my little phone speakers and it made everything better for a moment, that is until the serpents came. Then it wasn't better. Serpents rarely improve a situation.


Good ol' Nortt

fever dream

Pucker up.

Media announcement: I have a geodesically obsessive piece about architecture, engineering and the FUTURE in the current Oxford American. Your brain will be Fuller for having read it.



Man on Wire
nip/tuck, Season 5
Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet

I was out with the flu yesterday, wimpy and insufferable on the couch with a blanket and my viruses and all, so blessed to have all those that put up with me. Thanks, Jerri! I watched the pretentious and breath-taking Man on Wire, about the French tightrope walker that walked a line between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and it made me think of 1) my friend Terry who was one of those rare obstinate individuals who kept his landing gear on the same tarmac on which the rest of us cling as little as possible, and 2) the fact that if we really want to honor those who died in the 9/11 attacks, we should build two office towers on the site and make then one floor higher than the original, and put offices in there. NYC is a place of business; they need those buildings because there is work that needs to be done for the rest of the world.

After all that high-mindedness, I watched season 5 of nip/tuck on Netflix. Did you know you can watch Netflix movies on your iPhone now? Update your app, yo, the future is here. Anyway, I watched it through Netflix on the Wii and it is a gloriously terrible show and my wife got a Filet O'Fish and an orange drink for me for lunch, the same lunch I would have when I was sick at my grandma's house when I was little. The only McDonald's was on the Iowa side where she lived, across a rickety toll bridge, so dragging ass to McD's from our house on the Illinois side was reserved for special occasions, like when my parent's announced they were getting a divorce. We went to Rand Park on a bluff overlooking the river, by the statue of Chief Keokuk who never really lived there either, where I ran on the weird barrel thing they had, wolfed down a Filet O'Fish and minutes later responded to my parents big news with a bit of forced 70's-television-sponsored awareness about how divorce works, if they'd signed the papers already. I knew something was up because they both went.

We moved that night to Carthage, IL, to an apartment my mom picked out, impossibly far from a McDonald's. We still spent some time in Keokuk when my grandma wasn't in the hospital, but she didn't drive, so the arches were more distant to me. Anyway, all this flooded back in a  fever dream of TV and greasy fish patties and orange drink is manna to a soar throat and on the paused TV was still-fine-ass Lauren Hutton frozen in the face of a mid-smooch grandma.

I still sound like shit but I had to go record something for the radio and turns out the flu makes me media-resonant. I had a bunch to say about Public Enemy too but I'm beat. It will come back to me.