Media Announcement: I like this new Deerhunter album so much it reminded me that I review albums occasionally and that I should do so with this one. It felt good to bang that one out; I should do that more often. There is no Record Crate for this week, for my day job has had the audacity of taking up my days lately.
Deerhunter, "Desire Lines"
After yammering about it here, my friend Roby Rameauxn gave me his parents' vinyl copy of Buckingham Nicks post the Richard Buckner and the three of us nerded out over the cover for a bit, and my rude ego has precluded me from thanking him for it publicly until now. Thanks, Rob! This record totally does it for me. I hope I never get to a state of bitter decrepitude where records don't do it for me any more.
Throw me like a magnet to the sea.
I saw the phrase "captain gorgeous" somewhere on Facebook and it made me think of "Captain Badass" by Songs:Ohia. Great song; best song title. If I had unlimited time and mad fiction skills, I would crank out a zillion hipster short story collections titled all with vague song lines in lowercase on the cover like the kids do these days. My next one: "i am setting your heart on fire."
Wait... do we get a second chance or not in this life?
I love Greg Dulli. I wrote this thing about him and his bands years ago, and it might not be my favorite thing I ever wrote, but it is my favorite title.
I caught my new favorite band Cotton Jones in the wee hours at the local last night and lo, they were epic in their landscapes for what I stayed of them
More Pepper Rabbit.
but the real treat of the evening was opener Pepper Rabbit. Fronted by a very New Music kid who played clarinet, ukulele, piano and guitar and sang through a well appointed orchestra of pedals and loops. They had me by the collar the whole time.
So what if their tunes seemed mostly to consist of structural setups from within which the our haircutted genius may lovingly frame himself? It worked. I love these music student types that form bands now. Please, put in a clarinet loop part and two types of ukuleles because it is what your soul commands to be present at that point in the song.
Then, once you get your experiment side worked over you can become Kid Arron Copland like Sufjan Stevens or better yet a relaxed fuck-all-ateer like Richard Youngs, whose new(ish) album putters around the roots of the tree of pop without ever climbing. I dunno, maybe you, dear reader, hate all this precious music because you were reared different, but I was nurtured on Depeche Mode so an earnest croon over a patter of synthesis feels like home to me.
We've been watching Son of Rambow in spurts during dinner lately and the scene of the teen club (1:20 mark in the trailer) made me swoon a little. In my hometown, I would have given anything to stumble on unknown gaggle of goth girls licking temporary tattoos on our arms while an expressionless French kid led us in dance moves to "Just Can't Get Enough." We did find a gay nightclub that would play New Order and the Smiths for us, but that went downhill quickly when one of my friends got duly propositioned after being bought four or more screwdrivers and we never went back.
I thought about all this with all that bubbling in my ears when I walked over the Perkins Road overpass at lunch. I'm writing an article about grocery store lunch plates and needed a walk after devouring one, and standing in the shade on the other side of the bridge, watching for my bus to crest the top was thrilling in a kid-meets-life way. It might have been the turkey dope from lunch talking, or perhaps my old man bones being tired from staying out until 12-goddamn-30 on a work night or that one Belle & Sebastian song on the new album where he goes "Make me dance/I want to surrender" over and over and I want to slug him for singing so stupid a line that totally has me hooked because it exposes a maudlin side of myself I'd rather keep dormant, or even the way my daughter is a kid that's not a kid anymore or whatever, but it was all a little breathtaking.
Maya brought this pad home from school - elementary school, mind you. Suicide is no joke, let's be clear on that, yet I'm tempted to write people cheery, innocuous notes on this stationary. "Hey! What's up? Isn't Bored to Death hilarious? I suddenly want a trench-coat and some white wine."
Media announcement: The new issue of OffBeat is ready for your digital perusal and contains my quick profile of sacred steel maestro Robert Randolph playing Tipitina's in New Orleans on Oct. 9 and the Varsity in Baton Rouge on the 11th. Editor Alex Rawls has an illuminating interview with one of my favorite contemporary blues artists, Ruthie Foster in this issue as well.
Belle & Sebastian, Write About Love (out 10/12)
Like the dog upon any arrival, I nearly yipped with excitement when the new Belle & Sebastian showed up yesterday afternoon, for they are my latest loves. I couldn't wait to catch the bus in the crisp alien autumn we are suddenly having - I suppose 85 is approaching ghastly for some but it has been a sweaty armpit of a summer here and 85 feels like an icecube sliding down the back of your sundress - because the bus is the perfect place to listen to Belle & Sebastian, gazing out the tinted windows at the houses and the trees and the people and their collective hypnotic array just as some really wry line lights a match in your melancholy heart. And in the same tinny headphones where "The Stars of Track and Field" are frequently declared beautiful people, I was having a bad first date with this new record. I could hear it sounded good even though it didn't in these headphones and the songs just weren't funny. Like not at all. They were good, but any idiot can write a good song, B&S write good, funny songs! I was heartbroken, prepared to tweet my disgust with a rapier wit I found this album markedly lacking, but this morning, on proper (OK, computer) speakers, I see it for what it is and not what I want it to be. It is a man's writing about love, not a boy's, and the sharp edges are rubbed smooth and the glow is a subtle candle and not a firecracker's spark. I'm still not totally sold on it; I got bitten by premature enthusiasm for the God Help the Girl project so I'm cautious. When Write About Love finished I had to put on The BBC Sessions to right my toppled teenage soul but my grown-folk heart is willing to give it a roll in the hay.
I am, naively perhaps, a doctor truster in practice. I don't want to be there, they are indifferent to my presence as long as the obscure clockwork of insurance in in place, so where could any conflict arise? The eye doctor is contentious though, the whole of their analysis relying on "Which is better: 1 or 2, 1 or 2?" when neither is better and what does better mean. If it made me see clearly than it would not be better, it would be perhaps a baseline of satisfaction. Better would entail my being able to see through time (though it didn't work out for Odin; for all he saw was Ragnarok, the battle where the gods get their ass kicked. Check out the Ledberg Stone, depicting Odin being devoured by the battle wolf Fenrir who, earlier in the battle, the god swallowed whole for some reason. Norse mythology is awesome.)
or maybe Bozeman's Simplex as suffered by Blinky Watts in David Lynch's short-lived On the Air TV show. That might be cool.
So anyway, my expectations are not high with an eye doctor: just make it so I can read and see enough to do my thing, but this new one on the new insurance was ghastly, rude, impatient with the patient, etc. I feel petty complaining about customer service, I do, but....
She announced early on in the exam that I have cataracts and seemed offended when I showed dismay at this. And then later retracted that diagnosis. And on top of it, their glasses department used to suck and now (I had to go for a follow up visit - to an eye doctor!) is torn out and being renovated. Her insult to my infirmity was to say it is totally normal to need bifocals at forty, which OK maybe it is, but what next, an ear horn? Artificial hip? All I really want is new frames, yo. (like these, maybe, which I know they won't carry) She also got mad at my non-committal but honest answers at "3 or 4, 3 or 4" because neither were better and she put hand on hip and declared "Look, whatever you tell me is what I'll put on your prescription and you'll be stuck with that." Doctors suck, but this one sucks by doctor standards. Basically after all that, my prescription stays the same and I need new frames.
Anyway. Glad I got that off my chest so I can go back to telling you what I read, eat and listen to. Happy Monday!
The United States of America, " I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar"
I finished Black Cracker but it was maybe a tweet and/or an interview with Barry Hannah I read last week that sent me to Job. I have my grandma's Bible right over there on the table with all the other books though I'm certain it hasn't been cracked open in a decade or so. It a nice one, with the concordances in the back and pleasing gold on the edge but in the rare moments when I'm called to the LORD as they demonstratively say it there, I just Google it. Job is a corker, what with Satan's character developing like Anakin Skywalker in the first three Star Warses.
More unexpected than my reading the Bible is my reading the Russians, but while TLC told the same prison stories on into the night, I finally got sick of looking at Facebook, hoping for signs of life like a maroonee clinging to the crystal radio kit in his makeshift island shack, and the books were way over there across the room and I went iPhone Project Gutenberging for Faulkner since it was his birthday and he's another like the Russians that I want to get into but avoid like a locust swarm, but Old Will skirted their net and I ended up with Fyodor. I don't really know exactly what the guy in the underground is going on about quite yet, but this little bit from Book I, Part I seemed a blogger's credo
But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?
Answer: Of himself.
Well, so I will talk about myself.
Maybe that's why the Russians basically took over LiveJournal. Oh, and I watched all of Season One of Bored to Death and love it, and maybe that episode about the Russian nightclubs in Brighton Beach sent me to Dostoevsky. Like Ted Danson's remark, "Russian night club? I wanna go there!"
Today I conversed about Donovan a little online. I think he's a lovable magpie that occasionally stumbles onto genius like "Season of the Witch," (how to go from the Turtles to the Animals in one easy chord change) "Epistle to Dippy" (a perfect song that invented twee twenty thirty years early), and most certainly, the join-inner that out join-ins "Hey Jude" - "Atlantis"
Then I did a little interpretive dance to Love's "Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale" that my daughter found amusing
and while I was on a roll with my favorite songs, ate grilled cheese sandwiches to "Bonnie and Clyde" which I can't embed for some stupid reason. Here is the disaffected hot original version with Serge and Brigitte Bardot, and the equally or and then some hot use of it in Laurel Canyon when Frances McDormand gets Kate Beckinsale going, which I can't embed either. First world complaint, I know. All I'm sayin' is the comment section is all agog over Kate when Frances is the real dream girl there.
Smothered chicken plate with rice and gravy and greens from Zeeland Street Market. No improvements could possibly be ventured.
Ginormous pulled pork sandwich from @KickersBBQ. They are quick, friendly, on-the-streets, and most importantly, the pork is right at the perfect spot between dry and moist. Their sauce is tangy and flavorful, though I'm glad I asked for a light application; even then the sandwich was on the verge of becoming a sloppy joe. Accentuate your meat, BBQers of the world, for it is of meat that our hearts are made, not sauce. My suggestion, should you want it, is offer a simple, sharp Carolina-style vinegar sauce, cole slaw, and jalapeños (fresh preferred) and I will proclaim you the best $5 a person can spend in Baton Rouge. I will regret spending $5 on anything else if you do.
My wife, an amateur historian of rather piercing insight, remarked on how fired up I was yesterday about the Republic of West Florida on the day of its anniversary. Before then, I had a vague understanding of what went down even more vaguely when, but now I'm flummoxed that we don't embrace it more fervently. That shit is cool! At least put that one star on our flag, like on the pelican's chest, like Superman's logo or something.
I often joke that the Louisiana flag should instead feature a pelican shrugging its shoulders with those babies asking whatever French is for "Why didn't we just..." on a banner beneath their disintegrating nest. It is noteworthy that I have long forgotten as much of the French I took as I have the Louisiana history.
But yeah, I got my Irish up as they say in Black Cracker. As I've said, its about the author's years as the one white kid in the last un-desegregated elementary school on Long Island in 1962. Friedman deals with race well, relying in Reality Then tempered with Perspective Now and renders all the characters with remarkable sympathy. Friedman also wrote the decadently thrilling Tales of Time Square, which I need to re-read, or rather read completely. It had me planted in a Barnes & Noble chair one afternoon until my legs hurt.
The racially charged language and incendiary title (Confession: I got very self-conscious the other day on the bus reading a book with "Black Cracker" emblazoned on the cover with an African-American man sitting across from me. The reason: I am an obvious racist that fears being pointed out, like most white people that wish they weren't. Some burden we white folks bear, self-consciousness about our unsavory aspects.) carried therein will probably get it banned if it gets noticed. Here's a Google map of other where books are banned, from here.
Speaking of books, noticed, banned or otherwise, I stayed up late working on mine, metamorphosing the anecdotal into something hopefully meaningful or at least usable. The target is somewhere in the triangulation of anecdotal, meaningful and usable. Having John Coltrane wailing and swooning in the background has been all three, so I'm a let all 8 CD's of his classic quartet ride. One of the many reasons I love the subscription music thing: I don't need to have this package taking up shelf space, didn't need to sweat buying it for an outrageous sum or feeling guilty for having bought it for an outrageous sum and never having listened to it or pretending to feel guilty because I downloaded it. And still didn't listen to it and then a year later deleted it from m hard drive, a most calloused form of theft.
I do miss that delicious record store coveting, or the way a fancy exhaustive boxed set feels at a friend's house, but otherwise, music is really for the listening for me. I am listening to it now and theoretically somewhere a nickel of thanks is jingling in the Coltrane family coffers every time I do. I'm sure the process will be idealistically improved with time and then some business model will screw it all up and we will revert to wax cylinders and traveling bards and that will be cool too. It takes caterpillars to make butterflies to make caterpillars all the while music is still the flowers.
