Media Announcement:Here is my contribution to HTMLGIANT's Literary Magazine Club discussions on the most recent issue of NYTrant: "A reaction to the letter Breece D’J Pancake wrote but did not send to his mother before his 1979 suicide." Enjoy!
Folks are abuzz about Spark! I like this first story about how she is a ghost selectively appearing to old friends and neatly relating that to reminiscence. Her eloquence and poised prose is a nice break from the rough man talk I've been all up in as of late. Were I a ghost, I'd probably choose to spend my limbo years fucking with people. Moving really stupid things like the lawnmower or turning a plant by a few degrees, the kinds of things that the living would notice but would feel silly remarking upon.
Look! How blue the sky! How big the country! I don't know why I'm so excited! Maybe I'll read Walt Whitman on my phone during the bus ride home!
Life is all abuzz! Edited a big magazine story! Or rather received edits and pretty much agreed with them! I decided I'm not going to do Sweet Tooth anymore! My darling wife's birthday tonight! Tailgating tomorrow! England, Christmas! Who knows what the weekend holds?!
Happy birthday to my lovely, smart, and talented wife, Jerri. I could not have a better partner in life.
The second movement of 2x5 is Steve Reich's greatest pop concession, sounding like a skeleton track for a Supertramp or Sufjan Stevens workout, retaining some of his infinite texture business while conceding to the cozy-up immediacy of pop. The third has a bit of Yes to it, but Bang on Can might be bringing that to the table. Whichever, the common recursive awarenesses going on here only serve the accessibility of the whole. Reich is still no Terry Riley in the marriage-of-high-n-low arena, but he's on his way.
Steve Reich, 2x5, II. Slow; III. Fast
Last night, I got called out via email over something I wrote in 225:
I need to know what you are smoking. If you think _______ is anything but a chaotic mess of musical errors and sour notes you are high, or have no clue.
to which I can only say "Yes!" Not to my being high (am not) or to not having a clue (debatable) but that somebody read something and followed up and decided I was full of shit enough to venture an opinion! About art in lil' old Baton Rouge! It only took five years. My plan is coming to fruition.
He struck a match with his thumbnail and lit another cigar.
Nobody cares, but I feel a clarification is nonetheless due: this on page two of Smonk is not where I got my similar comment about Mark Richard the other day, though reading Richard's Charity and then an excerpt of Smonk made me want to read Smonk, like immediately.
The match-thumbnail thing came from an incident in a friend's apartment in Thibodaux probably 20 years ago, when some small time Cajun drug dealer sat at my friend's table and was talking about how if Ian Curtis had lived, he'd be Jim Morrison today to which I though, OK, maybe, he kinda is anyway right? and then the guy opened a box of kitchen matches, the thick wooden ones and kept lighting them with his cocaine nail, over and over, smooth, letting them pile up like Abe Lincoln tossing together a log cabin in the ashtray. It was like I'd never seen a match before.
I tried to learn how to do it myself but gave up and let that be his. Which is what reading all these books lately is. Not that reading needs justification, but it does in a way. It takes up a lot of time, whittling away options, and I'm a little bummed that Tom Franklin already did the match on the thumbnail because I really wanted to use it in something I'm working on but that's OK. I'll come up with something.
I'm thinking about how Paul Harvey moved from topic to topic on his radio show. He'd just squawk "page TWO" and go there, gulping a fresh throat of air before diving into another story about a young Boy Scout that did a good deed and grew up to become a U.S. Senator or a Marx Brother or something. If Tom Franklin mentions Paul Harvey in this book, I'ma stop reading. But I probably won't.
Shatner does Cee-Lo's "Fuck You" on Lopez Tonight. Note they swap out the n-word for Shatner and bleep out the F-word, making a big show of his transgressive behavior while still observing some boundaries.
The A/C in my office was disconnected as a part of it being fixed so I open my windows and then wedge justbarelyopen the door with an old Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine I found in the hall. A story about a dognapper adorns the front cover and an ad for subscribing to the Stephen King library the back. It slides in perfectly tight in the gap under my door. I usually open it and then latch the deadbolt to keep it from swinging closed but now with natural air in the mix, the door likes to slam continually with each fluctuation of pressure. I just flipped through its, expecting to see Tom Franklin or Paul Harvey or Cee-Lo or someone else from this train ride through synchronicity and thought this format would make a great lit journal; cheap newsprint, quick stories that stay with you for a bus ride and then become doorstops until the pressure rips them to tatters and they are gone. Ready for new words telling the same stories.
There is a good chance I will be Xmasing in cheery olde England this year, plodding around take-out tea in hand by the very pub depicted above. Yesterday I was walking down the stairs still aglow form the news wondering if when I spy the actual place I'll be all "I saw that on Google Sreet View!" and giddily so. I'm scoping out the Balti shops as we speak and must admit the teenage me inside the old crusty me's heart skipped a beat when I Google Street Viewed onto an actual British record store. I expect it will be the same crappy stuff as in a US record store now, but it was the only place in the world I wanted to go in my formative stage. I will now start cultivating both an outrageous southern accent to amuse the locals and a similarly pronounced "British" one to effectively communicate. I'm also thinking a large foam cowboy hat with a Union Jack sticker stuck upon is in order. "What's that, love?"
Last night my pretty lady and I heard David Sedaris read here in town and he is a master of the form: funny, personable, a litte distant, and totally lovable. I'm not completely sold on his new book, Squirrel Meets Chipmunk, a cheeky bestiary verging on fablery. He read a few stories from it and read them well and even gave over a minute to play Broadway doyenne Elaine Stritch tearing through one of the tales from the audio book. Squirrel is a brave step for a guy who made his name writing about himself, even if he is basically casting himself into his animal characters, and he might be at the precipice of super fiction, but the night was won with this New Yorker story and excerpts from his diary.
Also, class act, he paused to leap praise on Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which I agree is the best book I've read in quite some time, at least until I got into Mark Richard. I have a Tom Franklin book sitting right here in my bag because I read a paragraph excerpted elsewhere that made me go dig a hole and drop in my preconceived notions of how to form a sentence. Also DS broke into anecdotes A'ing the Q's at the end of the show and they are the unmistakably the nuggets to his prose, which is a thrilling thing to witness. Also, also, fucking love David Sedaris.
But yeah, England. I don't expect to go to the movies while there but if I did, may it be at the Electric Cinema.
"New Face in Hell" by the Fall seems a gleefully hyperbolic reaction to the mid-term elections, though it occurs to me that on Grotesque, originally titled After the Gramme - The Grotesque Peasants - Smith is kazoo-armed lacerating the whole of English politics circa 1980, exposing the partisan divide into which the poor are cast, and I feel that way myself about ours now. The whole election process is eely and I'm glad to have it slither back into the murk for a while. I always contest that I love Louisiana partly because it is a mess, so I should probably revel in having my fellow voters embrace a former exorcist governor with presidential delusions and a re-elected family values senator who has probably used the word "whoremonger" in a sentence while actually being one. So instead of railing against the new day in hell, I'll cozy up with the psycho mafia. Don't ask me who makes the Nazis, because I'm afraid of the answer.
I talked to guy on the phone yesterday that turned me on to Precious Bryant. How often does anything this surprising come out of a phone call? Most of my phone conversations can be corralled into "Where are you?", giving people money or explaining that I will give them money later. She's got a song called "Wrenched My Ankle!" C'mon! That's a brilliant thing to do a song about. Buck dancing is a good subject as well.
Precious Bryant, "Georgia Buck"
The above is not a protest vote against Elvis Costello. His new one failed on Rhapsody twice and that was just about as much effort as I'm willing to put in on it. I was just talking to somebody about when Bang on a Can All-Stars played here and nobody came and yet Iva Bittova was there and I got to see a sexorcism performance like the one below right here, mere steps from the crappy bagel place where we had lunch, and now I'm thinking about how it's easier to talk someone into eating a crappy bagel than it is bring to them to something that might affect their life a little forever.
Iva Bittova & Bang on a Can All-Stars
David Wegehaupt, Jean-Michel Goury and Friends performing Giacinto Scelsi's Tre Pezzi
Ed. to add: Someone came by my office this morning and mentioned Mississippi John Hurt when he heard sweet ol' Precious up there and 1) this person and I rarely agree on music and both agreed J-MS-H was an undisputed good in the world and 2) maybe I'm not so alone in loving things and 3) J-MS-H died on this day in 1966.
Media announcement: "I started my tenure with 225 out of frustration." is how I start my assessment of the Baton Rouge music scene over the last five years with 225 Magazine. In the print issue I profile aggressive, progressive rockers Twin Killers about what makes them tick. This was written two months ago, but my fickle ass is still into their EP. Also, a profile of Justin Townes Earle and reviews of albums by Cajun country classic D.L. Menard and modern country crowd-pleasers the 484 South Band.Busy month.
I read Lester Bangs' take on this Otis Rush record while looking for his article about Brian Eno in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung that I apparently made up because it isn't in there. And while rain is good Brian Eno weather, it's better Otis Rush weather.
Otis ich bin ein Berliners.
And speaking of reading, I didn't even read the Julian Cope article that accompanies the DETROITROCKSAMPLER mixtape on his website because I'll bet it is more genius than my deadlined mind can encompass. The jamz therein kick out.
The Pleasure Seekers (feat. a very young Suzi Quatro (AKA Leather Tuscadero) and her sisters), "What a Way to Die" as heard on DETOITROCKSAMPLER
Here she is as Leather doing "Johnny B. Goode" on Happy Days.
