neon patches of wildflowers

When I got to the library, a girl in the coffee shop said, "Nah, I'd marry Bill Cosby over Bill Clinton." The guy working with her asked, a little incredulously, "Over Funkadelic Bill Clinton?" and she said, "Yep, over Funkadelic Bill Clinton." I was going to look up and image for "funkadelic bill clinton" but elsewhere someone put up "zombie cosby" and so the pattern emerges.


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The walk to the library is now one mile exactly.

Mark Richard, The Ice at the Bottom of the World
Adebisi Shank, This Is the Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank
Blind Idiot God, Undertow
Santo & Johnny, Volume Secondo
Praxis, Profanation: Preparation for a Coming Darkness
John Zorn, What Thou Wilt
Erik Friedlander, Maldoror

Media Announcement: Local independent maching band needs your help + Wire + British Sea Power + Eugene Hideaway Bridges in this week's Record Crate at 225 Magazine.

At night, stray dogs come up underneath our house to lick our leaking pipes.
- from "Strays"

Mark Richard's stories are furtile ground for thought but his sentences are neon patches of wildflowers. They go like this except down and cut across and get stuck and then you have to get out in the muddy, stuck parts and you might not make it but you probably will but the person with you won't. But it will be pretty even when it isn't.


Santo & Johnny, "Sleepwalk"

I got an email this morning about a band called Adebisi Shank, particularly about their second album, This Is the Second Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank but only a few songs were available to me, so I'm instead listening to their first album, titled This Is the Album of a Band called Adebisi Shank. The OZ refernce almost killed it for me, but the artfully aggro, transpunk, jazz-tinged, surfin'-on-no-wave grind of the band, plus the Conceptual Art 101 album titles won me over. Words do matter, I guess. Also, it is the kind of music I would make if I could make that kind of music.

So here we are really feeling bad about what we finally ended up doing to Vic's horse Buster, us drinking about it in the First Flight Lounge after we called Vic's wife at home and she said Un huh and Nunt uh to the sideways questions we asked her about Vic being home yet, trying to feel out how bad was the tragedy, and her hanging up not saying goodbye, and us wondering did she always do that and then us realizing we'd never talked to her on the telephone before.
- from "Happiness of the Garden Variety"

Blind Idiot God, "Wailingwall"

Praxis (Featuring Iggy Pop), "Furies" (MP3 stream)

Our dad is out in the car listening to the radio scores because the power is off to the TV. We know not to bother him.
- from "This Is Us, Excellent"

Edited to add: last night on Man v. Food, host Adam Richman was inspired out of the blue (because he said this one place's chili had the consistency of pudding) to do an extended Bill Cosby impersonation, so that's three unrelated mentions of Bill Cosby in one day. My advice is to avoid pudding for at least 24 hours.

the vast heliograph of lightning

Illustration for Malcolm Lowry's "Lunar Caustic" by J. F. Ulysse, who, according to the Winter 1963 Paris Review bio, "began drawing at the age of 4, then as now, with his left hand."

I finished "Lunar Caustic" over lunch after a meeting that left one longing for the solace of a drunk's account of a week in Bellevue. It pulled itself together at the end in that deliciously triangular way Malcolm Lowry has with his characters. A trio of malfunctioning humanity supports itself as it tumbles alongside those too plain or base to not malfunction in the world's cruel chaos. One of whom, the manic and charming Mr. Battle manically semaphored through the window to ships on the river, while:

Only the vast heliograph of lightning responded distantly.

The novella is rife with ships; the narrator believe himself to be one as the DT's take hold, while a young murderer Garry desperately tells seafaring stories he doesn't understand to be tragic, eager to be interesting. Icebergs get smashed. Whales are killed. Elephants too. Madness is generally acquiesced to in "Lunar Caustic", opposite to how it was denied in Lowry's masterpiece Under the Volcano. Bottles, lots of bottles, bob around in the choppy seas of dialog. Maybe we are all ships in our own bottles. Ones with little triangular sails hoping to catch a little wind that might pull us out of our bottles and dash up valiantly on the rocks.

Today is weird already.

Sir Douglas Quintet, "She's About a Mover." There was a random something I thought I needed to revisit while on the plane back from England that I've been trying to remember ever since and just now I remembered - Sir Douglas Quintet - thanks to the late Zappa-ite Jimmy Carl Black and Steve Earle both doing this song on today's hectically selected playlist.

Malcolm Lowry, Lunar Caustic
Jimmy Carl Black, I'm Not Living Very Extravagantly, I'll Tell You For Sure...
Peter Case, WIG!
The Soft Pack, The Soft Pack
Steve Earle & the Dukes, Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator


"Jimmy Carl Black's Trip Through the Nine Layers of Hell." I want to say that somehow I ended up seeing Jimmy Carl Black perform, sitting with some other band and a hip somebody hipped me to who he was, or maybe I was at a show where said hipster hipped me to his departing in 2008. Or maybe he was supposed to play or something.

I had a dream last night that we were in a weird downward-slide mall and we were being stalked by this loner type that ran an aquarium store in the mall and eventually I had to beat him up, like in a Sopranos way. There was also a bear in this basement room of the mall that had the same funky red carpet as our kitchen had when I was five or six. Dream or no: who puts carpet in a kitchen? Today is weird already.

in the context of "Mississippi"

The secene in the bathroom, 1 AM Sunday morning, Clarksdale, MS. The whole weekend was like this.

This weekend:
Shakin' Snakes, Snakeskin
Bobby Little featuring the Counts of Rhythm, Bobby Little featuring the Counts of Rhythm
Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databank Vols. 1 & 2
T-Model Ford, The Ladies Man
Super Chikan, Chikadelic
BBC 4's A History of the World in 100 Objects podcast
Mississippi Public Radio
WRBH 88.3 FM, Radio for the Blind and Print Handicapped

Today:
Hound Dog Taylor, Natural Boogie
The James Gang, Thirds
Free, Heartbeaker
Gregg Allman, Low Country Blues (streaming at NPR)

I spent my weekend in a rental car, going to record stores and eating my way through the Mississippi Delta on assignment. Much of this story will be forthcoming but let me say that Mississippi Public Broadcasting radio has it figured out in a way that maybe only the BBC otherwise does (albeit on a less imperial scale), the New Orleans radio station for the blind's daily reading of the newspaper is the now transformed into the most human of poetry, I've finally spent the night alone in a haunted mansion, Google Maps does not really work in the context of "Mississippi", drove through an ice storm, and in a span of 24 hours I ate chicken spaghetti, hashbrown cassarole, foie gras with black and white truffles, grouper cheeks, sea urchin air, banana pudding (three kinds) and fried green tomatoes. I like you, Mississippi, and I like what you have on offer, 2011.














Here's also what it was like: just as I finished talking to the French master chef, Josh Razorblade Stewart staggered up in his red jacket and matching red shoes to sing the one song he was allowed with the band. Say "un-haw".



Then he staggered over to me to sell his CD pulled from that very red jacket's inner pocket (which revealed itself the next morning to be a blank CD-R - nice one, bluesman!) just as the retired judge and his funny wife waved me over to their table with their sweet, drunken gambler friends.

lifetime option

Groove with me for a minute on these pristine subscription cards from the Winter 1963 issue of the Paris Review. I'm tempted to tear one out and go for the $60 lifetime option. Notice there's no blank for the zip code.

Billy Bragg & Wilco, Mermaid Avenue
Malcolm Lowry, "Lunar Caustic"
Robbie Fulks, Happy
Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint, The River in Reverse

Told you I'd keep you posted about the "Lunar Caustic" situation. It's good so far. He says cheerily at one point:

Disaster seemed smeared over the whole universe.

I'm not sure what's up with this who-I-thought-to-be-an-arch-alt-countryite Robbie Fulks collection of Michael Jackson covers I clicked into. He plays the songs to the hilt with an undetermined level of irony, though I must point out that his nasal vocal delivery on "Mama's Pearls" sounds not disimilar to that of Weird Al Yankovic. Things get all John Zorn weird on "Privacy." Here he is leaning well into to "Billie Jean"'s consumptive gravitas, slaking his thirst from that well of denial.

Dark mentions Lunar

"Twelfth Night Merry Making in Farmer Shakeshaft's Barn", from Ainsworth's Mervyn Clitheroe, by Phiz (from here)

The Cars, Shake It Up
Elf Power, Elf Power
Arab Strap, The Week Never Starts Around Here
Zadie Smith, On Beauty

I should go get a king cake, being it is now carnival season on the calendar, and yet I haven't.

I also feel I should do a 2010 wrap-up of music and books but I haven't. I can do a movies one real easy: I only remember seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and True Grit in the theaters and they are tied for second place; good movies that probably get better with repeating (at least Harry Potter did and continues to do) but had their share of unresolutionary patches.


I've had "Since You're Gone" in my head for three days now. Listening to it again has not resolved the issue.

My sole resolution in 2011 seems to not resolve 2010 but let it pass on its way. Things are about to resolve in On Beauty though structurally and thematically this book is so close to White Teeth I almost feel I know how its going to play out; like that quick surprising orchestral buildup in "A Day in the Life" that ends with a thundering piano chord and a half-minute of dog whistle, followed by a slight but undeterring cycle of subsequent confusion.


This guy breaks it all down at 5:40.

I picked up a late Malcolm Lowry book, Dark is the Grave Within My Friend is Laid,  from the library over lunch and like everything else of his besides the magnificent Under the Volcano, it is described as "no Under theVolcano". The preface makes mention of his short novella Lunar Caustic which I read about somewhere, 76 pages about his internment in the loony bin, and the preface of Dark mentions Lunar is in an old Paris Review that the library might have so maybe I'll read that instead or even neither. I'm committed to tackling the audio book for Room by Emma Donaghue this weekend while on an extended
assignment/roadtrip, provided details of which get resolved themselves. I'll keep you posted.

burrrrrippp BUH buh, ba dip dip burrrrrrrah

Hello, lush, turgid, swampy home!

M.I.A., Vicki Leeks (free mixtape)
Ghostface Killah, Apollo Kids
Dali's Car, The Waking Hour (YouTube playlist below)

RIP Mick Karn, 52, from cancer, of distilled new wavers Japan and more important to me, Dali's Car, the one-off contentious Arabesque collaboration he had with Bauhaus' Peter Murphy. My friend Scott picked up the one Dali's Car album on a family trip to DC the week before I picked up Bauhaus' Burning From the Inside on a similar DC family trip and when we got home, we immediately made tapes of the other. I can distinctly remember careening around the parking lots of the doctor's offices in our neighborhood on my 3-speeder bike in time with Mick Karn's fretless bass going burrrrrippp BUH buh, ba dip dip burrrrrrrah on "His Box" in my little red Walkman, like I just did it on the way to work. It felt like what I imagine ballet feels like. It's track 2.


Dali's Car, The Waking Hour

There's a Patton Oswalt essay goin' 'round about the death of geek culture, that the immediacy and hyper-availablity of information deflates the blimps by which the music/comic book/movie nerds we all once were, it runs a samurai sword through the otaku of geekery. I feel what he's saying; Scott and I had to make seperate cross country trips and then another to Radio Shack for blank C-90's to exchange data about Peter Murphy side-projects. Information was precious to us not unlike the ring was to Gollum.

But, he loses me. The Internet has not bred a mass species of lazy book-and-music-worms and frankly, I'd have killed for the Internet in 1986, to find out somebody else knew what I was not talking about because no one would listen. Someone here in town. The Internet is just a more vast and crappier-laid-out library/used record store - one you don't have to flip through every title to experience, equally filled with the same stockpiles of neglected info waiting for someone to discover it.

So yeah, maybe because I'm more into the content than the artifact, the continuum means more to me than the milestone, it only warms my heart that the me's of now can jump onto YouTube to hear more they ever wanted to from Dali's Car or watch Repo Man right now, seconds after hearing about it.  My daughter is just discovering the whole of the Beatles and it is not a molecule less wondrous and consumptive to her than when I bought all the used Beatles LPs at that one place in New Orleans. You don't need the hunt to truly love something, all you need is love.