My lunch yesterday at the Chimes: charbroiled catfish poboy with a side of red beans & rice. You can probably find this exact order embedded in my DNA.
It is the time for year-ending and I feel less defintive and more fickle than usual. I still think Titus is on top, but really the best album I've heard for the entire year that lasted from yesterday through today is the s/t debut from the Soft Pack. Jeez Louise, it's good...
The Soft Pack, "Parasites"
But then it is tapping all my right nostalgia buttons and that is terrible criteria by which to judge the music of Now, so where does that leave me? Back in spring, I'd've given a spare kidney to the new Drive-By Truckers album and the other night I couldn't think what it was called. I just dismissed Spon half-heartedly in a Facebook volley and here I am minutes later all over it. It's tougher than it looks, being an arbiter of taste and all.
Also, I've never given the Walkmen the time of day simply because I was such a fan of Jonathan Fire*Eater from whose demise they sprang and I never got over it.
Jonathan Fire*Eater, "When Prince Was a Kid"
But I'll do it, have no fear. Bullet points at the ready.
I am seeing the world reflected in the more than the cover of Tom McCarthy's C, all its sinews and broken transmissions and mysteries of sparks flying through the air, but I think I'm saying "uncle" to this book. My year's reading has already been solidly about things falling apart and I'd like to see it put back together. I stuffed it in my backpack and instead searched for Carl Sagan's Cosmos on my phone and despite the billions upon billions of eBooksellers, it ain't there! That's what's wrong with us; not enough Sagan. If there is anything that needs to be read on out little devices/overlords, it is Carl Sagan. I'm not even going to look to see if Marshall McLuhan is available on the Kindle* or not because the irony might crush me like a runaway Geminid meteorite.
At least twice this year I've thought I'd really like to skateboard around to the Titus Andronicus album, one of those times being just now, despite my never having successfully skated boards to anyone's lowest expectations - I'm clumsy and unbalanced on the whole and derive little pleasure from accenting those states - and yet I wanna do some awesome tricks with ridiculous childish names while I listen to The Monitor. It might end up being my album of the year for that very reason.
Titus Andronicus, "A More Perfect Union"
A friend posted that the Mac Mini in her kitchen was stuck playing Transformer over and over. You could have worse computer problems. I popped it on as I washed the dishes, my phone propped up on the sill sounding tinny and clattery like a transistor radio and Lou Reed circa 1972 becomes genius in that form; the music barely bleeds through and you get just him, precariously tightropewalking the razor wire separating naked sincerity and sneering contempt. People's noses come up a lot. A woman's feet become her nose in "Andy's Chest", another straps dentures to her nose in "Hangin' Around", a song I thought to be a weak Sha-Na-Na-esque throwback number on the record until last night. It's a keeper. It made me want to do a rousing acoustic version at a open mike nite, something else I'm ill-suited to execute, and lo! he did it for me.
Lou Reed, "Hangin' Round" (Acoustic version)
I've been meaning to hit up the Soft Pack for some time since ace rawk-riter Joe Bonomo has been all on them in his medias social and probably otherwise, and they pay off.
The Soft Pack, "Down on Lovin'"
* Ugh. Of course, I looked and, of course, it isn't. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man should come pre-installed on every Kindle.
Taken at the bus stop after giving up looking for Cosmos. We have a million wires strung up and nothing going across them.
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
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.
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'sgreat 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!
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.
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
