The ringer is an actual bell!

I haven't had a phone hooked up in my office since I moved in but recently people have been on me about it. I found everything but the power cord for the cheapo cordless (irony!) I had at my last location and was sighing at the concept of wading the bureacracy to get a phone I didn't want when, like a mammoth blowing its trunk from behind a clutch of giant ferns, this dinosaur revealed itself in the back of my closet. It's seen better days; it may have been used to bludgeon someone, but it works. The ringer is an actual bell! No power cord because it runs on the electricty of the universe! I wonder how much unused power is pumped through the phone system just for me and the old grandma that still has a phone like this. I still hope it never rings but if it does, it will do it with charming electrical universe wonder. I secretly hope I can't do voicemail on this phone but I'm sure I can if I just call myself, which I can do now because I have a phone. The fact that the picture of this phone I didn't want was taken with the perfectly good phone I already had and prefer to use says something about the human condition. Maybe the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence is at play. I just got an email asking that I call somebody about something. Look out world, I'm phoning!

Robert Pete Williams, Robert Pete Williams
Earth, Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light 1 (streaming at NPR)
Kurt Vile, God Is Saying This To You
Sandy Bull, Still Valentines Day, 1969: Live at the Matrix, San Fransisco
Steffen Basho-Junghans, Late Summer Morning



This says something about the fallibility of memory. Or about shooting out sparks. Or maybe that's the button I press to call Throbbing Gristle.

Burning Rose

The bell tower is a hipstamatic penis penetrating the sky's burning rose.

Dr. Harry Oster, Living Country Blues
Billy Falcon, Billy Falcon's Burning Rose
Billy Thorpe, Children of the Sun...Revisited
Bright Eyes, The People's Key (streaming at NPR) and Cassadaga

Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club member Chris Franz is on my friends list and he posts great flyers from back in the era like the one below. And so yeah, I've never heard of Billy Falcon either. Adrenalized, highly-saxophonized Springsteen/Costello/Thin Lizzy-esque inna 1979 stylee, i.e. freakin' awesome, yo, full of dreams big enough to level all of Asbury Park if not channeled properly. "Billy Falcon's Burning Rose" is a great band name. Why doesn't anyone do that - go ahead and claim ownership of a band rather than maintain the pretend democracy of "and the." I suppose owning a Burning Rose sounded flashier than owning a Sunshine Thunder Band.




Billy Torpe, "Children of the Sun" I first heard this in the nth hour on a car trip somewhere early in our marriage and my wife couldn't believe I'd never heard this song and I can't either. Maybe because each time I hear it is like its own cocaine electric sunrise of a hundred blazing suns, roasting unicorns where they stand on the red plains of Mars.

NPR is saying this new Bright Eyes is the best Bright Eyes album ever. I'm the only person walking the earth, Conor Oberst included, the believes Cassadaga is and this one is good but segues perhaps a little too well into the discofied bonus tracks on the Billy Thorpe reissue and unless he hollers something better than "THE WHORE OF BABYLON" and makes me believe it, I'm sticking with my original decision.


Bright Eyes, "Four Winds"

a quick laugh

Todd Selby, The Selby Is In Your Place
Andrew Ervin, Extraordinary Renditions
Sunn O))), Black One
Composers Ensemble, Milton Babbitt/Morton Feldman

I haven't been posting food pictures as much lately because we are on a reprogramming plan and it's not that I'm taking in wholly unphotographable fare, in fact, very much to the contrary, but I'm trying to de-Henry VIII myself a little with relation to food. That said, the phở at Phở Quynh is pretty phở quynh good. I wonder if it is named that way on purpose? I'm inclined to say no, they seem rather no-foolishness up in there.

The Todd Selby interior design hipster porn compendium through which I thumbed at Books-a-Million is the opposite - constant nonsense, NutraSweet hipster interiors populated by beautiful people that you want to throttle for being wondrous specimens. The only places in there that bespoke a marked sense of aesthetic were Karl Lagerfeld's studio and some Parisian rich kid and his model girlfriend in his family's ancient spectacular library. Of course those places are amazing. Oh, and Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan's place looked cheery and tacky and fun. And a gal who lived on a tidy little boat in a London canal and hung out at the harbor club's ramshackle private pub housed in an ancient water tower. That seems an enviable existence. Otherwise it was one wheelbarrow of juvenalia spilled out and rearranged on re-purposed detritus furniture mixed with a level of nature that is unwieldy in a real person's home after another.

The sense of aesthetic will weigh into my review of Andrew Ervin's three-novella book about Budapest and those who don't belong there when it appears this week.

RIP Milton Babbitt. I met him once when he lectured at LSU and I asked him beforehand how technical his lecture was going to be. He asked if I was a graduate student in composition and I said no, an engineering student (which I was for a while) and he laughed, "Well, you might be able to follow the math then." All I really got from the lecture, something he didn't say himself, is that the secret to his art lies not only in the rigor but also in the puns. The whole of the architecture housing the meaning contained inside and nothing else. All that setup to the end of a quick laugh if you have the deication to make it to teh punchline.


Milton Babbitt, "Septet But Equal"

I am the February 2011 king of introductory source material

Sweet Abe from Mardi Gras World. One of these days I'll take some more pix somewhere.

Friday afternoon
Anthony Braxton & Chris Dahlgren, ABCD
Sigfried Palm, Intercomunicazione - Cello Recital 

Saturday afternoon
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
Little Milton, Rockin' the Blues
Slim Harpo, The Best of Slim Harpo
Funkadelic, America Eats Its Young

Namecheck alert: In his forthcoming Louisiana travel book Louisiana Rambles, Ian McNulty somehow recollects some possibly inebriated blather from me at Teddy's Juke Joint in his intro (down at the end). Also, in this month's Country Roads, editor James Fox-Smith puts me in his intro as well. I am the February 2011 king of introductory source material. Call me for your project! Reasonable rates apply. In the same issue of Country Roads, I take a shot at saying new things about perennial favorites The Chimes, Jazz Fest and the  Manship Theatre.

When Funkadelic is good, they are the best band in the world. Also tzatziki sauce! It's what's for lunch every day from now on. Or at least on what's on.


Funkadelic, "Loose Booty"

speaking of neon octopus

Love this kid.

Fuat Kent, Crumb: Gnomic Variations - Processional - Ancient Voices of Children
Halcyon, Close Ups
Rolf Juilus, Early Works Vol. 1 (1979-1982)

Hat tip to Robert aworks Gable for pointing out this album. I went through a lengthy George Crumb thing a few years back but don't remember ever hearing Gnomic Variations. Crumb's music tiptoes on cat's feet, like does Carl Sandburg's fog, then smothers you like that neon octapus might.

A composer with a similar ghostway with palpable intangibility leading to cataclism is Earl Kim; his Earthlight, discovered on a  Smithsonian Folkways record at the library in Houma when I had to slide under a locked gate to get it. Earthlight is one of my favorite piece of music.


Christie Finn (Soprano), Rachel Field (Violin) and Baris Buyukildirim (Piano) perform 'Earthlight' by Earl Kim live at a concert by contemporary performance program at Manhattan School of Music (in two parts)

I don't really know what I heard in Earthlight twenty years ago, but now I hear those delicate violin lines as the whine of nerves, electricity passing over the synapses in purring sputters and flaring arcs and the tiny piano jolts are the clunk of these bridges, like when a train passes makes a clack on the track. The Beckett fragments intoned by the soprano become a fractured consciousness that has to somehow manifest itself from this wiry, fleshy grid. The stage instructions call for spotlights to go on and off as each performer appears in the score; I'd like them to be triggered by microphones, rising and dimming with teh intensity of the sound of each performer, so that it would become a maddening off-kilter strobe at the manic points and a succession of alien sunrises and sunsets in the calmer parts. It would be a glimpse of the mind-body at work.

I've not really given any of Kim's music the time of day because of how much this piece means to me, so I'll let the rather anonymously named chamber group Halcyon run through a few, because I'm generous like that.

Speaking of neon octopus, I'd be remiss if I didn't invite Captain Beefheart to weigh in on such an image. Imagine Captain Beefheart delivering one of those maddening, claustrophobic Samuel Beckett monologues like in Not I. Imaging Beckett trying to tell Captain Beefheart how to do it. Imagine having Beckett's haircut. The man had great hair.





I am woefully ignorant of the sound art of Rolf Julius who passed away last week after an illustrious career in that field, but the go-to folks at ROOT BLOG have early recording up for filling this gap.

Like his bird

Hitch at Mardi Gras World. Like his bird, a firm dedline now looms after a pleasant lunch with the editor. I'm on it.

Young Jazz Rebels, Slave Riot
DJ Mark Farina, Mushroom Jazz Six
Sun Ra, Space Probe
Mostly Other People Do the Killing, Forty-Fort


Young Black Rebels, "Forces Unseen"


DJ Mark Farina, " a 3 1/2 hours Sunset Service from 6:30pm to 10pm as the sun sets over beautiful Lake Irvine..."


Sun Ra, "Outer Spaceways Incorporated"

aspirtated

Hipstamatic traffic.

Talib Kweli, Gutter Rainbows

Like three times already this morning. How come no one is talking about Talib Kweli's new record? It's like those other hip-hop albums folks are going on and on about except it is not asinine and doesn't sound totally like "product" nor does it suck immediately.


Talib Kweli (feat. Sean Prince), "Palookas"

Last night, while eating a slice of pizza, I somehow aspirtated some hot sauce and it went all through my system, up my nose, back of the throat. I swear some got in my brain. The experience was shockingly painful, and it was the relatively weak-ass Crystal hot sauce I prefer over the standard Tabasco. I can't imagine if it had been the real deal. Kids, don't snort hot sauce.