the slope of the Pleistocene terrace

I got a lamp for my office.

Champion Jack Dupree, Blues from the Gutter
janus, i am not
Jesse Fuller, Brother Lowdown
John Cale, Fear
Henry Flynt, Dharma Warriors
Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databank Vol. 2

Media Announcement: My review of Scott Tennent's Spiderland, the latest in 33 1/3's series of perfectly concise books about beloved and/or underappreciated albums, is up on outsideleft.com.


Here's a better look at the goth vixen trio Maya drew on my white board.


Jerri and I went to a lecture at the Old Governor's Mansion (top) on the topic of the 6,000-year old LSU Indian Mounds (bottom) over lunch. Scientists did their awesome tedious best demonstrating the scientific nature of gathering facts with complicated devices and laid into my brain forever that the hill that goes from the mounds down to the football stadium is the slope of the Pleistocene terrace and the attendees sought the narrative from these things. What about the place where they found a consistently used fire pit? Did they signal other mounds from this one? I kept hoping someon would mention UFO's or at least the obvious context of these ancient mounds as a pair of breasts. Jerri noted in the car that the ancient fire pit they found on one of the mounds would be where the heart is! Lectures, huh? It was more illuminating than any old discarded lamp and a more sustaining than any club sandwich.


John Cale, "Barracuda". THE OCEAN'LL HAVE US ALL!


Henry Flynt and the Flynts. I like the guy that keeps turning back to the camera.


Atlas Sound, "Autumn Intro Cascading Into University Courtyard"

spiders on the keys; whiporwills as pets

Mr. James Booker:


YouTube caption: James Carroll Booker the 3rd ,Hard drinking New Orleans Piano player, who died 10 days after this performance.

Nicholas Payton, Bitches (free download, hat tip to OffBeat)
Earl King, A Part of Me
James Booker, Spiders on the Keys: Recorded Live at the Maple Leaf
William Gay, "The Man Who Knew Dylan" from I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down

Mr. William Gay:

Crosswaithe drove the company pickup into the far southern part of the county. A waste of a country ravaged and scarred by open-pit mines and virtually abandoned, leftover remnants of landscape, the tailings of a world no one would have. At a beer joint called Big Mama's he stopped and asked directions and set out again. He drove on and on over rutted switchback roads. Jesus Christ, he said. He was driving into a world where the owls roosted with chickens, where folks kept whiporwills as pets and didn't get the Saturday Night Opry till Monday morning.

She brought me a plate of leftovers today

It froze over the weekend, and is back up to the mid 70's today.

Sandro Perri, Plays Polmo Polmo
Current 93, Baalstorm, Sing Omega and How He Loved the Moon (Moonsongs for Jhonn Balance)
Deerhunter, Cryptograms and Weird Era Cont
Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databank, Vol 4


RIP Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson. Besides sort of inventing the experimental pop music with Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV that fed my brain in college, it turns out he also designed the covers of those first three Peter Gabriel solo albums at which I stared all through high school. As far as I know, he wasn't in Current 93 (but was the other half of Coil with Jhonn Balance, duly eulogized by the band). All of his stuff seems to have fallen off Rhapsody.

And how come nobody told me I would really like Deerhunter and all the associated sub-bands, particularly Atlas Sound? That they did that throwaway look-Ma-I-got-effect-pedals thing but instead of that being the terminus of their engagement with songcraft, it was only a departure point? Why does Deerhunter lead me to ask a bunch of questions every time? It is bubblegum made from dust, stolen beer and dreams. Better get all his Atlas Sound home recording stuff while you can.



But whatever, boring, I know. How about this? I asked one of the cleaning ladies at work what she was making for Thanksgiving - she always tells me what she's barbequeing every weekend - and then I asked if I can come to her house instead. She brought me a plate of leftovers today. Those greens were perfectly vegetal sour with big hunks of pork and the chop was so tender it pulled apart with a plastic fork. I got a good thing going.

So, where is Roosevelt?

I found this giant mounted and framed map of the Gulf, particularly a chart of "soundings in fathoms" as it is labeled, in the trash on my way to meet my buddy Charles at the coffee shop. It was a bit of a walk to lug this thing, but I saw another car stop to comb through a different pile of trash up the block and thought with alarm, they'll get my treasure, so I picked it up.

Charles is a mythology expert, deep reader of Russian literature, amateur historian of Socialism, and works at the neighborhood grocery store, and the topics of discussion included: Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, e. e. cummings, World War I, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Trotsky, Lincoln, Grant, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Hart Benton, Isamu Noguchi, "kids these days", streakers, libraries, record stores, and the concept of "cool". I was delighted that he opened with Teddy Roosevelt because I'd just read this (the review, not the book) and could proffer up on my phone the accompanying picture.

I headed back, hauling this giant map the ten blocks back to the house, considering calling for a ride and then thought, would Teddy Roosevelt call for a ride? Not the Teddy Roosevelt discussed over coffee.

As if on cosmic ironic cue, a couple holding a stack of real estate flyers pulled along side our one-way street while I held a giant map, asking "So, where is Roosevelt?" Roosevelt St. in Baton Rouge is a less-than-savory strip forming the porous membrane between campus and the poor black neighborhood to the north and I asked if that's what they really wanted, feeling like the total classist/racist I probably am. Plus, it's not far but a bit of a complicated route to get there from my neighborhood (see previous parenthetical). What would either Roosevelt or any of those kindly old Russian comrades we so vehemently lauded at our little cafe society meeting think of me?

The woman shuffled through her papers and said, "Oh! Where's Franklin St., I mean!" I pointed to the part of my street on the other side of a busy thoroughfare bisecting it, a block nearly identical to the one in which we stood and she scrunched her nose. "Over there?" she asked with the singularly naked, snobbish disappointment one adopts during house-hunting. I should have sent them where they originally asked if that's how they are gonna act. It might have redeemed me in Teddy's eyes.


Buffy Sainte-Marie on Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest TV program, circa 1965

What kind of man reads Oxford American?

This kind. By the way, you should pre-order the 12th annual music issue which I'm in. I'll remind you.

Glissandro 70, Glissandro 70
Richard Youngs, Sapphie
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
Scott Tennent, Spiderland
Slint, Spiderland


I took Maya and her friend to go see the late(ish) show of HP7.1 and we sorta got in trouble clowning around Urban Outfitters beforehand. And that place looks like such fun...

As for the movie and in general, Harry Potter is not for me so I don't need or expect to have an interface with it. Maya is all up in it and had read the books and thinks about it and breathes it, though not like she does the Beatles. If I'm gonna lose that girl, ooh la la I'm gonna lose that girl to the mop-headed classics, not Twilight Jr. + which is how this movie struck me. More magic, less tragic, y'all. I did appreciate that they have given Hermione some depth in this one, and I liked the fight in the coffee shop. And dang, Helena Bonham Carter, way to represent the mid-forties.

I read bits of Jerri's copy of Howl, bought at City Lights itself, for it seemed the right thing for the season. So many people on my lists up at 5am shopping, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. Though I don't know how well Wal-Mart fits in with the 1955 hipster sense of negro. Even I succumbed and got a sweater from the Gap, seen modeled above.  I might read Howl every Thanksgiving from now on if I think of it, put it up next to the traditional William S. Burroughs reading.


William S. Burroughs, "A Thanksgiving Prayer"

Instead of by madness per se, Jerri's hand got a little destroyed by my mother's cat during a freak episode, but we made it. We ate very well, possibly one of the best Thanksgiving dinners my mom has made, so, thanks.


Covet with me my mom's three compartment crockpot/warming aparatus.

I read Spiderland by Scott Tennent, proprietor of Pretty Goes with Pretty, while listening to Spiderland by Slint at the laundromat this morning. The laundromat is the perfect place for Slint: chatter competing with cyclic rhythm all interlaced with subsumed desperation, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon. Except it was Louisville in the case of Slint. I have more formalized pronouncements about Tennent's Spiderland forthcoming.

Oh, at the above pictured table, my mom used the word ho in the course of telling a story about the neighbors. Didn't see that one coming. I suppose she could've said the daughter of whoever was one who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, so it could have been weirder.

C'mon, get yr Howl on and buy a sweater! The economy is at stake! Family and America too! A-rooooooo!

remember the back half

Maya and I saw inconspicuous written in chalk under a stairwell near the LSU Sculpture Garden. There's hope for these kids yet.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth
The Drones, Havilah
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Tender Prey
Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databan Vol. 3 and Logos
Glissandro 70, Glissandro 70

If Atlas Sound has Bedroom Databanks, I have time. Also I don't remember the back half of Tender Prey being so sweet. Not much else to offer but the songs.


Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, "Slowly Goes the Night"


The Drones, "Penumbra"


Glissandro 70, "Bolan Muppets"


Atlas Sound, "Sheila." I've listened to this song 6x this morning. My darling sister-in-law Sheila is organizing and covering almost all of our Christmas of Englanding so she's been in our minds a lot this week but she is awesome in her own right and so is this song and happy thanksgiving, mf-er's one and all.

gooder

This one little leaf is about as autumnal as it gets around here. This was shot through an open-screened window while wearing shorts in late November.

The Lovely Bones
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databank Vol. 1  
Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databank Vol. 2
Butthole Surfers, Pioughd + Widowmaker! (only because I don't have that Beme Seed tape anymore)

Pretty good at making records, that Kanye West is. This new album sounds like an artisan version of all the boilerplate pop music to which I listened at the pool this summer. Atlas Sound is riveting stuff; I really dont; know whty I never latched onto it before. It is temporarily riveting, passing like a breeze or a fever, but that's my favorite kind of rivet lately.


Atlas Sound's cover of Kurt Vile's "Freak Train" via BDv2.

While I'm taking the air out of accolades, Zadie Smith sure can write a book. The four pages I've read so far of White Teeth are in full repeat in my brain. The Lovely Bones started out sweet and then got magical and I thought: this is how you make a movie! and then the magical part went on and on and turned into a Gap ad or a musical number or a Blind Melon video or something and I thought: oh yeah, this is how they make movies. I hate movies. So much expense to bleed the story so dry for so many people. Jackson's pointless take on King Kong was more delicately handled. How is it that Lord of the Rings the more understated line of his oeuvre?

Oh shit, I almost forgot. This new Barry Hannah story emerged and it is unquestionably fantastic. It trickles out day by day and I love it even more for that. Thanks Five Chapters! From part two:

 Goodie was from California with a different voice or he couldn’t bear her, but even she was affected and went into a drawling mush-mouthed countryese when she needed more charm. In the service he’d known pleasant, smart, efficient Southerners. But their voices were an agony, a ball of grub worms in the throat.

Today, by the way, is the 12th anniversary of the marriage to my wonderful California-voiced wife Jerri and myself, gooder than any Goodie ever told in song or story. I'm a lucky guy.