Jerri shot this at lunch. I'm liking the beard, just when it is nearing the time to shave it off.
Media Announcement: In this week's Record Crate for 225, a Sonic Youth mixtape, and appreciation of this new angle of the Decemberists, and passing along some info about a couple of informal shows that might just happen in the area if y'all step up.
I said I'd listen to Radio Dept and I am, if nothing else, a man of my word when it pertains to the relatively inconsequential. Good band, like Jesus & Mary Chain a generation later without the upfront hubris, which is probably how it goes if you are from 2002 Lund and not 1983 Glascow.
Andrew Ervin's book is, so far, spellbinding - the first story going down in Budapest, nestling into a concept of Mitteleuropa that I have from back when I was even more pretentious than I am now and liked those early dour Wim Winders movies (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick was a particular favorite) and reading German Expressionistic plays. Georg Kaiser's trilogy of The Coral, Gas, and Gas II was something I was dying to talk about, but no one would bite.
Ervin's first third of the book is named for and maybe modeled after Bartók's 14 Bagatelles, and the temptation is to listen to those but I don't remember listening to his string quartets and I like string quartets almost as much as anything.
Yoda statue at Mardi Gras World. I started editing my photos a little; I hope you're happy. It turned a crappy photo into a Thomas Hart Benton painting lacerating the myth of Star Wars.
I love when someone else puts their favorite thing on the Internet because for just that moment, it will becoem your favorite thing, or perhaps just that perfect thing like Monoton is that Scott posted at incidentals and accidentals, a sidecar to his zippy Vespa of a blog, Pretty Goes With Pretty. I've never heard of them before, might not remember them tomorrow, but today Monoton completes me. I believe this is precisely how The Force works. I'm gonna heed his suggestion of listening to Radio Dept. first thing tomorrow, but for now I'm gonna bliss out on the recursive properties of oneness.
Monoton, "√1 = 1"
Scott wrote a great little book on Slint and made me care about a band I never really cared for. Spiderland came on after the Ramones while Maya and I were playing cards last night and we both looked at the sound coming out of speakers like bemused animals.
This Chicago album is thirty-seven hours long and is by goddamn Chicago, and yet it is fitting into my day/aesthetic needs quite nicely, opening up some sort of band-nerd wormhole. Probably has to do with weird time signatures being mapped over our four-on-the-floor world over an extended period. Warps not only the fabric of the parameters of taste but also time itself. No wonder they have to ask people what time it is! Whether anyone really cares! About time!
Do check out that photo essay from Botswana's metal scene linked above. Who understands a troubled people better than does the devil?
Much like how my Elvis is Old Fat Elvis, my Moses is the Old Crazy Horned Moses. Also from Mardi Gras World.
Saturday, my mom came up with the rest of my stepbrother's/uncle's/grandmother's records with which I had not already absconded. My stepdad had a son concurrent with his mother having her youngest but they were all three music nuts. I got all Mama Cook's old Beatles albums at one time; word has it she went down to the hotel in New Orleans in 1964 to see, with screaming masses, the gods emerge from the lobby.
Sunday we played tourist in New Orleans and visiting two landmarks that had somehow gone unvisited: Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World where the big floats are all built and their surreal props stored; and Stein's Deli where the closest thing to NYC Jewish deli fare can be had. And if there is another/closer, tell me!
Sunday night I took the above photo of whichever relative's Chicago V with Tommy peeking around the side. Jerri took some amazing Mardi Gras World photos with the Hipstamataic app and so I gave it a whirl. As I went to sleep, I flipped through Lester bangs' collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung and landed on his review of the above mentioned Chicago live album.
I'd been reading the Larry McMurtry memoir all weekend; its a treat to read one by a guy who's had success at writing about not himself and it gave me a lot of food for thought about my own book, who's deadline and scope will be discussed with some finality this week. McMurtry and Bangs both are in love with the rawness of their subjects (1950's Texas and the antiquarian book trade; methamphetamine and post-1960's rock, respectively) and have a distinct knack for turning a reader on to something, which is what got me into writing in the first place. When you point something out to someone, it gives one's narcissistic ass a moment to really look at the back of that hand that one supposedly know so well. Look at the veins and weird ridges, the scabs on the knuckles and follow our own finger out to something more interesting than ourselves.
Or, as a painter friend of mine once scrawled on a flyer: When the wizard points at the moon, don't look at his finger.
Old Larry started to lose me in the second half when it became less about things like
In a tent (later a shack) not far south of our ranchhouse, in a post oak scrub near the West Fork of the Trinity River, lived a woman who had (reportedly) been traded for a whole winter's catch of skunk hides, the exchange occurring when she was about thirteen.
and more about reading and finding himself as a young man in a world of books at Rice University. That skunk lady is worth the price of admission, more stupendous and wrought with hubris than all four sides of Chicago At Carnegie Hall and I might just power through at least until the Alan Lomax biography shows up and this whole book thing becomes more crucial and negates all else.
Brother Jed has been out there casting the fornicators of our fine university into the fiery mouth of hell for countless springs now, though I wonder what has become of his cohort Sister Cindy? Did she succumb to her oft-mentioned former sinning ways? I always kinda liked her; she was scrappy. Who will condemn our soroity sisters now? It occurred to me when I took this photo that Edward Scissorhands has likely been out for the entire life of the detractor on the left; his sign says "I'm Not With Him --->". I like how resolute his shadow appears. On the other side, obscurred by Jed, was a girl offering "Free Hugs from an Athiest."
Man, the Nightingales liked a long-ass song. The Fall was always good for that too. If I had to go pee during my set at the radio station, almost any mid-80s Fall song would be a realiably-beated respite for 5-6 minutes. This Sonic Youth mixtape is what the dr. ordered. I'm taking back the other Sam Shepard book I checked out and getting a Joe Brainard one instead. Yep. Bout that time.
Grace Hartigan, Frank O'Hara, via here. I read something yesterday mentioning her name and realized I had no general visual sense of "Grace Hartigan", just a place on the modern art timeline. She's got startling range, unlike most of those macho paintslingers under whose historical shadow she resides. This one makes me think of Tom & Jerry. I also like how this is a diptych that isn't.
I'm almost through or maybe already through with Cruising Paradise. It started out great, one single-coal-ember motel tragedy after another, fizzling out against the cold of the night but somewhere in the middle it turned into a diary detailing that he doesn't fly and how it makes life difficult for his handlers. I think the diary portion takes place during the filming of Thunderheart in Mexico, though I can't find the German actor he mentions, but anyway, it all but lost me entirely. It's funny how it might have been saved just by a shift to third-person, like that really matters, but it does.
I thought I was listening to The Ideal Copy just for "Drill" but the whole thing is a balm. I know I've said this before, but I remember coming home from my crappy donut job one hot summer evening in 1987 to watch Wire perform "Drill" on the short lived incarnation of The Late Show hosted by Suzanne Somers with my dad. She had Red Hot Chili Peppers on the next evening, starting my lifelong distaste for the band (the unavoidable dalliance with Blood Sugar Sex Magik notwithstanding; I assume that album was all Rick Rubin's doing be cause it sticks out like and erect gym sock in the smelly hamper of their catalog).
One of the hottest British rock groups in the world today. Suzanne is a sport, the pretty girl at the party trying to get the uptight, Sartre-reader-type to loosen up a little.
Grace Hartigan, Sweden, 1959.
Check out Helen Frankenthaler and Ms. Hartigan cutting up at a party (from here), probably making fun of how serious everyone is acting. They are like Lucy and Ethel up in there. "Oh, lighten up, you!" they are pshawing at Fairfield Porter. Or maybe Phillip Guston just told them a dirty joke.
Nerd note: OK, Blogger, get right with YouTube and sort out yr differences. It's killing my buzz to do this all in HTML mode, and you do not want to see me with a killed buzz, do you? DO YOU?
Or, as a painter friend of mine once scrawled on a flyer: When the wizard points at the moon, don't look at his finger.
