it's the weight of the world weighin' at us, darlin'

This is above the microwave at work. I don't know if I get all the juxtapositions, but I'm picking up some of what it's laying down, or at least cleaning up after using the microwave.

Joanna Newsom, Have One on Me (backwards)
Twin Killers, Lemon Heart Opera
Avey Tare, Down There

Reviews: Google Alerts is supposed to handle all this and nothing ever shows up so I never go to look, but look!

• The Advocate was kind to my piece in the Oxford American about geodesic domes back in September.
• The Stranger's Slog blog praised "a marvelous long poem about Buckminster Fuller (the stanzas are in the shape of geodesic domes)". 

Thanks!

I'm listening to  Have One On Me in reverse track order because otherwise I'll never really listen to those songs at the end of the three discs. I'm caught in this record's orbit even though it feels a bit like one enormous song broken up into eighteen enormous songs. I keep singing it's the weight of the world weighin' at us, darlin' even though I know the line in "Good Intentions Paving Company" really is all the way to the thing we've been playing at, darling, not because my misheard version is better but because it is the weight of the world weighing at us, all the time. I like the idea of weighing at as an action.

That "Still Life of Curves and Curls" song by locals Twin Killers is a corker. It's like being on a  fast horse being chased by others on fast horses.

Weight, or more correctly, mass is what causes orbits, right? More precisely, you need mass and orbits to get rotation and that causes weight, I think. I genuinely like listening to Animal Collective and their associated products/projects, but they are the most bloodless "sensation" to hit the Yoot Kultcha in a while. I used to think they sounded kinda phoned-in in a good way, but now it's like their answering machines are phoning each other.

That pelican picture gets weirder every time I look at it now. It weighs at me.

let me lay a some Jimmy Dean on you

Guy Clark and Vernon Thompson at the Red Dragon


Antony & the Johnsons, Swanlights and I am a Bird Now
Nick Flynn, The Ticking is the Bomb
Jimmy Dean, Big Bad John and Other Hits

What a great show! Guy Clark wedges right into the totally tedious Uses of Humor in Writing internal discussion I've been having with myself in that he is of the old country school, wielding a joke with the same ease as a Sunday School lesson and yet was enough of a country expat to transcend both. I would've caught some video but people started shifting in their couches up here in the VIP section and blocked my view. I was left with merely enjoying the show. My buddy Clarke (different from Guy Clark) is correct in declaring this the song of the night.


"Randall Knife"

Vernon Thompson, his guitar player stage left, offered a muted tempest counterpoint to Clark's honey dipped in bitter herbs but the real revelation of the night came during Vern's three-song mid-set set. He talked about the Chilean miners and then launched into a straight-up folk version of Jimmy Dean's "Big Bad John." One of the worst songs of my childhood. I hated it almost as much as "Nashville Cats" and "Just an Old Fashioned Love Song." BUT, take away the choir and the pickaxe and Dean's aw-shucks-America out of it and corny-ass "Big Bad John" is a great song! Really. I'm surprised as anybody. Clark (again not my friend Clarke, but it would've been funny if he did it) took the stage after and said, "Vernon, I think Jimmy Dean oughta stick to making sausage." One wonders if somewhere in "Please Pass the Biscuits" lies a similar gleaming nugget of magical truth.



.


While waiting for the bus home yesterday afternoon, Maya and I walked over to the field where the Golden Band from Tigerland practices. Last week or so, we watched them do a rather amazing version of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face." Not kidding; it was really good. She has it in her head (Maya, not Lady Gaga, though I don't pretend to speak for her) that tuba is for her, though would prefer a sousaphone because its easier to carry. It just hit me that the band director barking the same orders over and over, over the beat, echoing off the apartments behind the field were a woman, reasonably driven mad by this every afternoon, was screaming out her front door, sounded a little dirty old Andre Williams' version of "Please Pass the Biscuits."


I love a video of a record player.


Right before that, I think somebody on Facebook discovered Antony & the Johnsons for the first time. They are one of the best things out of the last ten years.  


"For Today I am a Boy"

No further transcendence was revealed on the rest of his greatest hits package, but let me lay a little Jimmy Dean on you regarding international relations. As Paul Harvey would've said were he still here to guide us: good day!


"Dear Ivan"

possibly remembering the wrong sky gondola

The sky and trees and a car star as "pink lightning"

Badly Drawn Boy, It's What I'm Thinking Pt. 1: Photographing Snowflakes 
Nick Flynn, The Ticking is the Bomb 
Jack & Bobby



Media Announcement: 27-channel sound systems, minimalists against cancer, Caribou and Guy Clark are featured in this week's Record Crate for 225.

I am being inundated this morning with things I had and people I know.



Like this from here via this. I am pretty sure we had a copy of this very phonebook around the house in 1980. We lived in Carthage, IL., in an apartment only a few blocks from the jail where Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith was shot. Quincy was the nearest big town, and my mom would take us on occasion to Ming's Tea Room, the only Chinese restaurant I remember being around in that tender age of America. She'd pretend to know what all the Chinese characters on the wall meant and I'd eat egg drop soup every time.  There was/is some kind of park thing called Quinsippi Island out in the river that I believe one reached by treacherous sky gondola. The only reference I can find to such a thing in Quincy is an Italian restaurant named La Gondola.



 There was a sky gondola left over from the '84 World's Fair in New Orleans for a while, so it's possible I'm conflating. More discrete than that a balloon in a tree is the charm of possibly remembering the wrong sky gondola.




Then this from them via here. Tom Waits recorded a new vinyl 78 (why not go shellac, though, if you're going there?) with the Preservation Jazz Hall band of whom I know a couple of members that were on the session, and you can get it in a deluxe package with its own special 78 record player.Not well enough for them to slide me one, I suppose, though I'm open to getting to know people better. I have a closet shelf full of 78's that need a player, preferably one that I don't have to buy myself. The 78 is in an edition of 504, the New Orleans area code, eerily connecting this to the whole phone book thing,

Nick Flynn is good y'all. And so is Badly Drawn Boy, though I wanna steal his hat and Jonathan Franzen's glasses and become a king of all media like Rush Limbaugh used to say he was.. Also good is Jack and Bobby, a disregarded  show from the WB about a kid that will be president one day, like a Wonder Years set in now with future follow through. It is schlocky a bit, but all the main characters are at least a little bit terrible and selfish and the writers have a great sense of piecemealing story tension together.

Dwindling devoted readers, thanks for reading. To steal a line from Magnetic Fields, I only keep this heap for you.

Oh, well.

The world is but a tangent to my haircut.

Pedro the Lion, It's Hard to Find a Friend
Damien Jurado, Water Ave S
Vic Chesnutt, Drunk 
Badly Drawn Boy, It's What I'm Thinking Pt. 1: Photographing Snowflakes

I forget about ol' Pedro the Lion, mostly because they are so boring, but the good kind of indie rock boring, listless couch boring that is like peanut butter on the dense grainy bread of activity. The finest bread alone does not  a sandwich make. I heard a college radio show the other day where a precious, boring girl was playing song after song of precious, boring navel-gazer indie rock instead of the yippee-let's-dance-everybody boring music the station usually plays and it was so great and perfect. I wanted to send her and her roommates a pizza. This was my super huge favorite song in the world for a month in 2001.


"When They Really Get To Know You, They Will Run"

Ditto for Damien Jurado.


"Halo Friendly"

I started out wanting to post that I was taking a break from posting here because of general workload issues, but we see how that went. I wish I had a copy of Will Oldham's Joya handy to play right now. That is a gorgeously boring record. But hey! Badly Drawn Boy has a new record! He's totally boring and tedious with his perfect, fussy songcraft! It's part one of a trilogy! Right on!

Vic Chesnutt was, however, never boring. Upon his demise, I told a friend that moved in circles with him in Athens. She said, "Man, I went to see Night of the Iguana with Vic Chesnutt!" and started laughing. I too move in the right circles. I wish I'd been smart and brought a video camera when Vic played 10 songs to all 10 of us that showed up at the Spanish Moon two Halloween's ago, when he did a song he said Jeff Mangum ran over to his house and said "I wrote this but you gotta do it" and he did and it was both of them and something more. Oh, well. Here's DBT's Patterson Hood doing my favorite song off Drunk.


"When I Ran Off and Left Her"

you're gonna wake up one morning as the sun greets the dawn

13th Floor Elevators, "You're Gonna Miss me"
Curtis Mayfield, "Move On Up" 
Nick Flynn, The Ticking is the Bomb
Paul Weller, Catch-Flame!
David Johansen, Here Comes the Night

"You're Gonna Miss Me" was on the radio once I got back through the sunbeams of the morning jaunt to school and before the drag to work and I got so much done yesterday I feel all Curtis Mayfield about the days before me. I think the teenagers of America are missing out on foisting their wild youth culture on the olds via the mas-media. Elvis on Ed Sullivan wouldn't happen now because the grown-ups have 100 other channels they can turn to telling them what they want to hear. It's a little sad. How will they shake their heads in disappointment at you if they never see you?




I met a guy this weekend that drunkenly announced "I'm gonna have my own TV show" and I almost told him "You are my hero" until I realized he meant he wants to have his own TV show. I was thinking it was in the works. I don't want a TV show, I don't even like TV all that much.* I liked having radio shows when I had them and have kicked around the idea until I kick it into that black hole where all my free time goes and I realize I'm just looking for some strange when I got the good stuff right in front of me.

Remember your dreams
are your only schemes
So keep on pushing
Take nothing less

This new Nick Flynn book is rivetingly written, and I'm thinking to review it along with The Adderall Diaries because they seem related; a similar story wrapped up in similar stories filtered through two different people. Isn't that how jokes work? Like there's no new funny on the world and it's all in the telling and that's what we really like?

*Except I do. I'll save my Cheeto's for you.

the grease of the writing machine

The typewriter soloist for Leroy Anderson's The Typewriter, for orchestra (with typewriters) at the symphony field trip last week.


Joanna Newson, Have One on Me
Bill Callahan, Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle
Little Bob & the Lollipops, I Got Loaded
Solomon Burke, King of Rock 'n' Soul
Various Artists, Ranking Miss P Presents: Sweet Harmony
Nico Muhly, I Drink the Air Before Me
Gregory Haimovsky, Debussy: Works for Piano 

Above is the grease for the writing machine that I have been today. 4390 words and counting.

I like heresy

Frog!

We tore out the creeping cypress vine and a frog hopped out and kept certain folks, all of us, actually, entertained for the better part of an hour. I like how it looks like its eyes are being pushed out for our amusement.


A wreath of vines

While I was up on the ladder trying to extract this bushy thing from the pergola and the power line without falling or being electrocuted, we were making fun of poor old John Lennon on what would have been his seventieth birthday. There was the breathy retellings of close encounters with The Beatle filling up NPR that morning - how ironic that he mentioned dying in your interview and then he did? Good old Ironic John, coming through with death so he can become a martyr. See? I'm horrible.  I was imagining instead the septuagenarian and his wife shilling for the Tea Party, staging a Tea-In with corny full page ads in Rolling Stone with him and Yoko sitting around a tiered setup of trifle, their faces cast in bored humorless stares,  holding teacups aloft, captioned Won't you join us for tea?



I don't really think he and Yoko would have done that, though who knows what politics would emerge in their dotage. If the Tea Partiers would get behind marijuana law reform and push to get us out of the war, and war in general, instead of just being desperate pawns for corporations that will sell them off for meat the second the fools let them make it legal to do so, maybe the sweethearts of the old rodeo would have signed up. Just saying, I like John and love Yoko but heresy is of great amusement to me. I appreciate a good liar and enjoy the warm glow generated by a hypocrite. I don't trust them or necessarily want them in charge of things, but they are fun to have around.


My buddy Steve Babcock going deep meta at the reading.

I like heresy because it pulls everything apart like a stoned person does an alarm clock, exhibiting the base human desire to see how things really work. The Word Storm reading Friday night was a great success; I think 5 out of the 7 short pieces I read were hits, which is better odds than old Ironic John had in his solo career, and he kinda invented The Hit. My friend Steve won the night, if there is anything to win, with his live deconstruction of a theoretical bad movie script inna pedagogical slam poet stylee. By the fourth iteration, we were groaning when he approached the podium, the "not more of this" that accompanies a group reading, but each time he pulled us off the ledge and had us in the palm of his animated hands. I need to do more readings. This was only my second one and it is instrumental in determining what works and what doesn't.


I imagine the realization duped Tea Partiers will one day have will look a little like this.

After the reading, my search for a celebratory beer found me with friends at a bachelor party at the karaoke half of a local Thai restaurant. This is the hell to which my heresy will one day bring me. I like this place because they have these great tables with those intricate cork-carved landscapes inset and covered in glass. The tables suck to eat at, for all the added bonus makes the lip of it too low for my fat American legs, but again, it's like heresy. Let's turn the tables on tables! See what happens! The devil always needs another advocate!


They got peanuts for while you wait, too.

Once the vine was torn away and the frog's patience worn thin, we noticed a balloon caught in the neighbor's tree. There is a discrete charm to such a thing like there is a discreet one of the bourgeoisie. I mention this for two reasons: 1) we went to the new Five Guys with the exact same excitement as everybody else in Baton Rouge did last night - a lady from the news was there eating with her family! I texted my wife! - while realizing that rallying around a new chain restaurant is about as Baton Rougeoisie as it gets and whatever, it was good, and 2) I had to look up the movie and then the difference between discrete and discreet, as well as hermeneutic to make sure it means what I think it does for an article I am going to write RIGHT NOW, lest I become the worst kind of karaoke-of-writing heretic imaginable. Imagine.