because of the plague

Why Virginia College had this guy on a float for the Baton Rouge Christmas parade is anyone's guess.

The Pointer Sisters, The Pointer Sisters
Various, Takoma Eclectic Sampler
LCD Soundsystem, This is Happening

Speaking of Allen Toussaint and music I used to hate, Nick Spitzer played and old Pointer Sisters tune written by Toussaint on American Roots the other night and truthfully, its never occurred to me to look into their back catalog at all because of the plague "I'm So Excited" upon our species. Remember when they were on the charts at the same time as ZZ Top and their songs were not terribly distinguishable from each other? And to think some people long for the Reagan years.

Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, a great song by the Pointer Sisters.


The Pointer Sisters, "Yes We Can Can"

My dalliance lasted for precisely one song. Now I'm more into steel guitar/dobro guy Cal Hand. Try not to totally trip out on the one below. And LCD Soundsystem. I intended to start listening the year down to find a top ten; the only definite entry is the Titus Andronicus album - but I'm pretty much all over the place.


Cal Hand and Leo Kottke, "They Only Moved the Stage" from The Wylie Butler


LCD Soundsystem, "Dance Yrself Clean"

This might be my favorite song of the year even though it came out last year. And no, I'm not kidding. I accept that it might have been put together as a joke, but the joke imploded or exploded or did something that only Carl Sagan can explain. I kinda choke up every time I hear it.


Symphony of Science/Carl Sagan - "A Glorious Dawn" ft. Stephen Hawking

New Drive-By Truckers song

I'm not usually such a marketing tool but I love those motherfuckers.

Drive-By Truckers, "Used to Be a Cop" from their forthcoming album Go-Go Boots. Click forth for "webisodes" from the band. Or watch below.


The Go-Go Boots Episodes - Episode 1 - Drive-By Truckers from Drive-By Truckers on Vimeo.

Funburgers for everyone!

Incrediburgible! Old Burger Chef and Jeff commercial. Thanks, Todd, for reminding me. There was one across the river when I was a kid in Illinois. We'd go there for a change of pace from McDonald's.

Dr. John, Destively Bonnaroo
Allen Toussaint, Life, Love and Faith

Saw the new True Grit last night. It's a movie mostly about rope, I think. There is rope everywhere: stringing people up, rescuing them, holding up the tents, keeping away snakes, etc. Even Mattie Rose's omnipresent braids that heep her head on straight are tendrils of rope. It's probably about other things too, like the art of enjoying making ones movies which is my favorite thing about Coen Brothers films; even when the movie drags, and they all drag, you can tell they love it. But yeah, the movie is mostly about rope with side attribute of elegant smart-mouthing.

Jeff Bridges' crusty grumble made me think mostly about Tom Waits and Dr. John, both of whom have Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame nominations or inductations or whatever, which is cool. I wore myself out on Tom Waits years ago and am just in recent years finding that special Dr. John place in my heart. Becoming newly acquainted to the south as a kid, Dr. John was the corniest-of-the-corny, in the goddamn right-place-but-musta-been-the-wrong-time all over you like noxious gas cloud, all the time.

I hated Stevie Wonder for many years because of "I Just Called To Say I Love You."  My hatred of that omnipresent song  took full fiery blossom in my adolescence and my mom told a family friend that it was my favorite song and I was put in the position of acting appreciative when said friend presented me with a 45 of it at the Christmas party. The friend was all, "It's the song you like, right?" and I couldn't figure out who my mom's  joke was really on, so I said yes, and she said, "Well, c'mon, let's play it." I put it on the old console record player (that I woudl kinda kill to have now) that sat in the front room we only used for holidays, and we collectively grooved on the punchline of an amorphous Christmas joke.

I'm pretty sure that was the last record that ever got played on that console stereo; it was probably still on the turntable when it was hauled to the street to make way for that same friend's old piano, a temporary spot for it while they moved houses and twenty-five years later, it's still in that room. Sometimes it gets played at Christmas too.

This went a lot heavier than I intended. What I really wanted to say is that I hope the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame finds some loophole through which they can give Harry Dean Stanton an award and then put Stanton, Waits and the good Dr. on the same stage fleshing out "Right Place, Wrong Time" and the collective nexus of weirdness among those three will open an extra-dimensional portal where we can transcend Al Tis and Become One, and Burger Chef and Jeff will be there at the end of the light tunnel with Funburgers for everyone!



Edited to add: I just read Matt Bell's great terrible gift story up on The Best Damn Creative Writing Blog so I dropped mine in there as well. It's like the prize with your Christmas Funburger!

pretty song

Carpathian Forest, "The Eclipse/The Raven"

Carpathian Forest, Through Chasm, Caves And Titan Woods

My voice is ragged from teaching, droning on about document building strategies and style templates and whatnot and I had a 10-minute window today to shake it off and thought Ah! Norwegian black metal! Those guys hate their fellow man even more than a whole putrid phalanx of software instructors, and there just so happened to be in my little feed reader thingy the top 100 Norwegian black metal albums of all time, as if I summoned it from some ghastly blood ritual conducted in an unheated, abandoned trailer at the ragged edge of civilzation's tattered skirt, and at number 17 was Carpathian Forest and I was all Yes! Yes! Consume me now, unfeeling void! Pierce the thin, jaundiced skin of human endeavor with your filthy claws and release the rot from its sac, and they raged and they raged and I was diggin it like a grave because at times of stress I become the fourteen-year-old I never was in real life and just as the horns were starting to sprout, here comes a rather pretty song, presented above. Sung by this guy!
 

Natterfrost from Carpathian Forest, as shot by Black Metal photographer extraordinaire Peter Beste.

Sure, it's a corny setting of Edgar Allen Poe, growled by iceblind, drunken, fascist, pagans who pretend they are monsters so hard they become them, but it's really a pretty song.

Oh and hey, not metal related: my friend Traci Burns is a badass of writing and has a kinky lil' piece up in Fiction Fix 8! You should go read it. Go on, now! Do what you're told! Hail Satan.


Gaahl of Gorgoroth (#11 on the list) interviewed about his influences.

shadow-dog; hyperdrive; bead mode

Sukie is enigmatic.

Teodoro Anzellotti, Leos Janáček: On an Overgrown Path, In Remembrance, Three Moravian Dances, et al. and Bach: The Goldberg Variations


Fly girls from one of Baton Rouge's unaffiliated dance crews making spirits bright at the Christmas parade last night. If I had a better camera and better shot, I'd make them stars of my Christmas cards. Which means I'd have to do Christmas cards.


But no crew, however, can touch Unique Dance Team in this parade-goer's opinion. Below is when the hyperdrive kicks in.




One more: my daughter at bottom right, going into bead mode before the Dow Chemical float. "Just don't throw me cancer, mister!"

I got more, but I had a magnificent brunch at Louie's with my lovely wife and now am set up in the office to write two articles and fix a website and probably something else with little but you and Teodoro Anzellotti's accordion mastery to keep me from my appointed rounds. He does the Goldberg Variations and then this enigmatic shadow-dog of a piece from Luciano Berio. Enjoy!


Teodoro Anzellotti performing Berio's Sequenza XIII

the arc went wrong

I saw this on the way to the State Police Cafeteria earlier this week.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Petra Haden, Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out

 "Um....heads, yes," gasped Archie, Reaching into his pocket for a twenty-pence piece. "Tails, no. Ready?"
   The coin rose and flipped as a coin would rise and flip every time ina  perfect world, flashing its light and then revealing its dark enough times to mesmerize a man. Then, at some point in its triumphant ascension, it began to arc, and the arc went wrong, and Archibald realized it was not coming back to him at all but going behind him, a fair way behind him, and he turned with the others to watch it complete an elegant swoop toward the pinball machine and somersault straight into the slot. Immediately the huge old beast lit up; the ball shot off and began it chaotic, noisy course round a labyrinth of swinging doors, automatic bats, tubes, and ringing bells until, with no one to assist it, no one to direct it, it gave up the ghost and dropped back into the swallowing hole.
- Zadie Smith, White Teeth, p. 377

I post this not just because, holy shit, what a great and perfect paragraph, but because I've been thinking about old, abandoned fiction projects, mostly because I have other things I should be doing, and one of them was a parade of painfully obvious existential dudery that started with the protagonist absently walking out of his apartment with the spoon from his yogurt still in his mouth. He flipped it from the door toward the sink in that little apartment kitchen and it landed with a ringing clink in the coffee cup in which the yogurt was eaten. That was really the only part of the story I'd worked out in my head, neglecting to explain why he was walking around with of spoon in his mouth (oh, wait, I get it) after putting his cup in the sink.

Ms. Smith plugs a similar but wondrous incident among 400+ pages of similarly killer incidents while all I had was a yogurt spoon and when I read the above, I was suddenly divested of my whole terrible story upon which I could needlessly muse, so I'm happy about that. It's like taking out a trashbag of things collected in the course of cleaning a room. The room still looks the same to outsiders, but you know some secret hurdle has been removed.

This thing of Petra Haden singing all the parts, instrumental as well, of The Who Sells Out is an example of a terrible idea given beautiful life through careful execution. I feel compelled to note that I still hate Glee without ever seeing it and refuse to budge on that stance.

Edited to add: Speaking of writing, I saw my first ever royalty statement for old Darkness, Racket, and Twang and four copies of it have been sold in the last year. I'm hoping to meet my publisher while in England over Xmas and collect my bounty in a pint of the finest local. Amazon has people in a tizzy because they've plugged in Author pages where you can see how many books you've (not) sold. I suspect with my sales record, I need not wear out my refresh finger. I did see that they have cheerily discounted my title to $6.07, just in time for holiday gifts! The Kindle version can be had for even cheerier $.30 further discount! The future is here and it smells like Christmas!

Don Rich agrees

The darkness. I've had two nights in a row that involved the Louisiana countryside, driving into the night's starry embrace. Last night my buddy Clarke and went down the wrong branch of a highway and ended suddenly in the scene above.

It's rare that I get out to places like that, or rather, do I get out of my car when I get to them, but we got out and took in the stars for a minute before the were-armadillos and cyclops gators (Edited to add: or this! BTW, this is what the news is like here.) came from the swamps hungrily after for us. Or before some similarly lost bastards like ourselves plowed into us. For the most of the night we listened to:

Various, Allons Boire un Coup: A Collection of Cajun and Creole Drinking Songs
Various, The 12th Annual Oxford American Music Issue CD

On the former is a version of the Cajun stable "Parlez-Nous á Boire" done by Chris Stafford and my all-time favorite interview subject Dickie Landry on thermonuclear sax. Here is Dickie talking with Robert Rauschenberg, Trisha Brown and Darryl Pottorf about the years those three crafted some the greatest art of all time.


"A Conversation with the Artists" was videotaped in May 2005 in conjunction with the Rauschenberg/Pottorf/Rauschenberg exhibition at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The resulting DVD release will document this rare and significant visit with Robert Rauschenberg, one of the most important artists of our time, along with his collaborators Darryl Pottorf, Christopher Rauschenberg, Trisha Brown, and Dickie Landry. The conversation was moderated by Herman Mhire.


My actual copy of the actual Oxford American finally arrived. Sometimes I'm digital-oriented, ready to be beamed into the gleaming, seamless future and others I'm so glad for the artifact. Look how purty that is. No PDF or iBook will ever look so lovely resting atop a wicker footstool. This might be the best music issue yet, definitely one of the best music issue CD's yet, and I'm humbled to be a part of it.

The purpose of last night's sojourn into the dark was for a story coming in January, so I'll hold my details close, but let's just say that contrary to popular belief, even mine until last night, swamp pop mainstay Don Rich is awesome. We caught him tearing it up in a tiny 100-year old bar in tiny 100-year old Pierre Part with a three generations of women working the bar and a bunch of the dudes from Swamp People in attendance. I give the whole experience a thumbs-up.


Don Rich agrees.

Just to add to the greatness of life, here is my daughter from earlier in the evening, getting her Ringo on to "Lovely Rita."


Seriously, if you are in the Baton Rouge area seeking a music tutor for your budding rock demigod/dess, Anna Byars is yr gal. Email me and I'll put you in touch.