I love okra and tomatoes cooked down to almost a plasma consistency; the combination of slight vegetal bitterness in the okra and the tomato’s sweet-sourness is a killer pair, like Bonnie and Clyde, but it never dawned on me to introduce sausage into the mix. The sausage’s salt and grease elevated this old couple to some kind of inventive, kinky threesome. I'm into it, baby.
Today for lunch, I had the catfish plate from Calandro's for lunch as lovingly described in one of the most fun pieces I've done yet for Country Roads, "Five Days. Five Plate Lunches." as well as this mediation on 600 Franklin in Natchez and the nature of grown-folks bars. Also, my profile of Justin Townes Earle appears in the November 2010 issue of 225 Magazine, in prep for his Dec. 1 appearance at the Manship Theatre.
The cozy loneliness of 'One More Night in Brooklyn' cuts through you like a dripping faucet in the night until you finally get up with it.
Also, I got over my fears and cautiously dared to not like the new Brian Eno record up at outsideLeft.
It's one of their less-storied efforts, but I think the Fall's 1994 album Middle Class Revolt is aces. It has a resigned convulsivity that bears the exact weight as melancholy but has something more active to it. Like it is doing something about the fiend in the mirror besides smashing the glass.
The Fall, "You're Not Up To Much"
Their cover of the Other Half's "Mr. Pharmacist" is the greatest song in rock 'n' roll. Stock me up for the winter time!
The world's greatest video starring Ms. Brix Smith and Ms. Leigh Bowery
This was in the haunted house at the sorority row trick-or-treat last night. Kids threw hackey-sacks and knocked out the pumpkin's teeth and a guy in a purple genie costume/burkha crouched behind there set them upright as they fell. Not sure why the guy behind the pumpkin needed to be dressed up, since you couldn't see him when the teeth fell out. Maybe he just took to the veil.
Media announcement (inna Twitta stylee): Ramsey Lewis, Emily West, Webb Wilder, So. Culture on the Skids in BR ths wk + Voodoo/Blackpot info @225BatonRougehttp://bit.ly/9p1Vqn
I finally watched The Foot Fist Way last night and now everything I read, I read it as Tae-Kwon-Do instructor Fred Simmons. Like I was looking at IMDB comments and even "Was the above review useful to you?" read in his voice with that stare is perfect. More movies like this, please, and less movies that are like all those other movies. Which are shit.
An extra: I Help People Who Do Drugs from Fred Simmons and Craig Robin
I could never figure out Boyd Rice. Some claim he's a Nazi but I've seen him more as one of those brutal art types that deals in a more open sort of misanthropy. An Aleister Crowley nerd. He was one of those characters championed in the RE/SEARCH books that formed a big part of my art awakening in college, but somewhere in that time I bought a zine because he was on the the cover, and it turned out to be a white supremacist rag posing as an experimental music zine, which seemed like a terrible marketing strategy for both. It's like when I got into black metal and had to be in constant fear that I wasn't supporting actual monsters vs. people who liked to act like monsters and think about them too much. I remember a bunch of us really liked this album at the radio station, and I'd play this creepy late-night song on my creepy late-night music show.
Boyd Rice, "Disneyland Can Wait"
This came to mind because I got word a big ole Temple ov Psychick Youth book arrived and they were similarly on the cusp between art weirdos and scary weirdos and now I'm less impressionable and have a greater grasp on consequence and where mind control gets you, I'm not sure what to think. Back then, I drew the little three-pronged crosses all over my notebooks like I did the Ozzy logo on everything in jr. high.
I wrote a rather mean-spirited review of the new Brian Eno album, partly for humorous effect. partly because it isn't very good, mostly because I have other things I should be doing but I'm waffling on it. To whom am I being mean? What compels me to do so? These Crowley types are all about the strong > weak paradigm which is not where I'm at, aesthetically. Fred Simmons, Tae Kwon Do master, would berate me for this, but I like a little weakness. I have a weakness for weakness, I suppose. I suppose I should get back to work.
Media announcements: I review Nick Flynn's latest memoir The Ticking is the Bomb and the iPhone app version of Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries at outsideleft.com.
There are no situations in which a song from the Cars' first album doesn't sound brilliant compared to whatever preceded it.
From 1978, y'all. We are still trying to catch up with Ric Ocasek's sunglasses.
Some of this playlist was from last night, bleeding into today. Crunch time. It's kind of exciting to be involved in but boring as hell to talk about. I had to look up traipses just now, for spelling and meaning. I always have a fear that a word I like to use in things means the exact opposite of what I think it does. I don't know what else traipses could mean, traipsing even kinda makes the sound "traipses" when you traipse, but then I was wrong about erstwhile for ages.
Every time I put up one of those media announcements, I'm conflicted about how to reference a website, even though I should have it down pat by now, considering this is one. Do you say an article is at whatever.com or in it? For magazines, it's always in them, but a website is more of a place, cognitively speaking, than a bound thing, though a place in real life has intrinsic boundaries; it has to or else everywhere is one big place. I usually say up at or up in because that's how I got it there, by uploading it, or sending it to someone else to upload it, but really, who cares how it got there besides the author and the editors? It's just there to everyone else.
Thanks, Steven, for pointing me to Cardiacs.
Camper van Beethoven, "Sweethearts." This is where I got the caption for the gear video. It took me a while to remember were it was from.
The now casting its recursive shadow on the now. Or something like that. I don't know; I'm tired.
Media Announcements: I am in such a tizzy over Ozzy that I failed to mention my profile of Joanna Newsom (she plays Tipitina's in New Orleans, LA, USA Nov. 13; Dear band I recently interviewed elsewhere that expressed interest in being her opening act: I tried.) in that same issue of OffBeat.
It is a city and it is also a creature,a mentality, a disease, a threat, an electromagnet, a cheap stage set, an accident corridor. It is an implausible character, a monstrous vortex of contradictions, an attraction-repulsion mechanism so extreme no one could have made it up.
- Luc Sante, Preface from Low Life
We are the system, we are the law
We are corruption, worm in the core
One of another, laugh 'til you cry
Faith unto death or a knife in your eye
- Motörhead, "Love Me Forever"
I'm neo-souling it through this grey Mondey. Much as I loved Part One, I can't find a foothold with New Amerykah, Part Two. It feels like a "personality record," a "let me do my thang" record, kinda like Prince has done since (pick your own Prince tipping point for you. Mine is Lovesexy) and like Prince, Ms Badu's thang is a compelling one, perhaps more compelling than that art that comes from it anymore. Like Prince, I'd almost rather see either of them at the bank or the grocery store than in concert just because it would electrify the mundane. If only that translated to the standard exquisite production on their albums. Makes me almost glad D' Angelo has failed to make another album in a decade still reeling from his last one. Almost to all the almosts mentioned.
You wanna know what's long? Anna Karenina is long. I'm reading the free Project Gutenberg version of it on my phone as a whelp-I'm-on-the-couch/bus/central lockup-I-might-as-well-read-something book and the way they do it there is that it downloads in chunks, like as you go. It keeps a running percentage (I'm at 8%, where a train backs over a station porter, severing the poor bastard in twain, just as Anna arrives in Moscow. Women have a way of doing that in this book.) but there is no heft of pages that lets me really know how I'm doing.
I'd totally forgotten how much I love Vincent Gallo's When album. That Vincent Gallo. He has trip-hop cred (should such a thing be possible), having performed in SAMO with Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Mudd Club back when everything was converging, and really, @vincent_gallo is my favorite celebrity. He acts so scintillatingly outrageous and weird that he comes around to charm from the other end.
"My Beautiful White Dog" and "Honey Bunny"
Nurse With Wound defies context.
"(I Don't Want To Have) Easy Listening Nightmares"
We made a pass at the bookstore after dining in the same Five Guys franchise as was Peter Berg, former Chicago Hope doctor and director of Friday Night Lights. He's here making a movie based on the game Battleship (sorta) featuring Liam Neeson and Rhianna. They are set to film part of it in the blues bar down the street. I know none of that makes sense, but it's true. Joe Jonas was recently spied canoodling with his ladyfriend, who has a bit part in the thing, at a terrible old-lady restaurant chain. We get minor sightings like this all the time; our town looks movie-generic and there are awesome tax incentives at play.
So anyway, let me wipe the stars from my eyes to tell you I tried to read a part of Tom McCarthy's C and I felt like its prose was a logic puzzle; the kind that takes one longer to figure out than it is fun to figure out, but Lost States was a light wonder. It's about long forgotten and abandoned subdivisions of our nation. Its prose is airport magazine breezy, full of cheap jokes and somewhat unsound in it's purview; the West Florida Republic was included and that was not a temporary state or a secession but it's own country for 90 days.
BUT, it spoke of Forgottonia, a mildly successful secession gesture in the western potbelly of Illinois in the 70's born of a lack of highways in the region. It's not the most glorious cause for revolution but I lived there right at the navel of that potbelly while it was going on and I've never heard a peep of this before. C'mon! I'm ready to get a "Never Forgottonia" tattoo: a fist gripping a torn strip of I-72, the proposed Chicago-Kansas City conduit that only cuts throughout corn between Hannibal and Champaign, A million squealy teens can watch my tax dollars (or something) bring a Jonas Brother to my adopted home's worst sandwich place forever henceforth on the Internet and yet Forgottonia is forgotten-onia? There is a Facebook group at least.
I'm annoyed that I've never heard of Forgottonia, it being a so-so tale notwithstanding, mostly because it kills me when there are good stories right there on the ground. I've always enjoyed a good dungeon master who gets me through the maze and now want to be that dungeon master for others. I believe this is the OG classic D&D starter module I started with. The one with the keep; if memory serves, the fancy sword in the keep master's closet is cursed. I told Maya about the different kind of dice in D&D: 4-sided, 6-sided, 8, 10, 12, and 20-sided and she thought that sounded cool, and today she declared herself to be into sci-fi and fantasy, so ok. I could draw parallels among metamorphosis and science fiction and mythology and directors and Battleship and being cut in twain but I've led us both far enough astray by now. (Rolls d6) OK. To your south a cave opening leads to two tunnels about 10 meters in, one leading east, one west. Which do you choose?
