good mood today!

A dramatically lit shot of the baked chicken special at the Chimes from yesterday. The chicken expresses the common nature among all sentient beings as hunks of meat; the potato salad, the encroachment of society; and the roll, the Glowing Orb of the Unknown.

Einstürzende Neubauten, Zeichnungen Des Patienten O.T. (Drawings of Patient O.T.)
ST-X Ensemble, (Xenakis) Ensemble Music 1: Plekto; Eonta; Akanthos; Rebonds; N'shima
Alva Noto & Blixa Bargeld, Mikikry
Alva Noto, For 2 and Utp_

Despite all this post-Armageddon, garbage-cult-summoning-their-whale-god music might imply, I'm in a really good mood today! This appearance of Neubauteneer Blixa Bargeld making squid ink pasta on a German cooking show spurred all this racket on.


Einstürzende Neubauten, "Styropor". Back in my college radio days, I was fond of dropping this tune into my afternoon DJ sets. People loved when I did stuff like that. They were all, "Thank you for opening my ears!" Like all the time! I had to stop because it became too much pressure, opening everyones ears all the time.


Oswald Tschirtner "Eine Kleine... (In One Small Town, a Philosopher Says the Character of Mankind is God Given)", 1996

Oswald Tschirtner (AKA Patient O.T.) entered an Austrian mental hospital in 1947 after suffering mental disturbences stemming from having been a French prisoner-of-war during WWII. From the website:

Through the encouragement of the founder of the Gugging house of artists, Dr. Leo Navratil, Tschirtner began making elongated figures he called Kopffussler or “Headfooters.” These creatures with arms and legs that are the same length, are not original to Tschirtner and can be found elsewhere, yet he presented them in inventive ways that have evolved into other minimal forms of figuration. At the suggestion of Navratil, the artist also did his own idiosyncratic versions of photographs or paintings he was shown. He rarely initiates any drawing, but will produce works upon request; on the other hand, one is never sure how or to what degree the end result will conform to the original request.

From 1981 to his death in 2007, Tschirtner had been a member of The Artists House at Gugging, the realization of Navaril’s dream of bringing together artistically active patients to offer them better living conditions and more opportunities to create. At Gugging, he led a quite and orderly life there, working crossword puzzles, and getting on well with his fellow artist residents.

Tschirtner’s work is included in the Collection de l’Art Brut (Jean Dubuffet’s personal collection), Tschirtner’s work was also part of an exhibition called “War and Peace” at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland as well as the exhibition “ABCD: a Collection of Art Brut” at the American Museum of Folk Art in New York and the Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago.

Iannis Xenakis - Plekto for Flute,Clarinet,Piano,Percussion,Violin and Cello

Xenakis is a badass among twentieth-century composers, infusing his pieces with impenterable mathematics and architecture and who knows what else and yet, retaining the psychologically stimulating aspects of the atonalists.

He was a badass in other fields as well, like he lost an eye during a street battle with a British tank during the post-Axis British occupation of Greece in 1944


I don't know anything about glitch artist Alva Noto but I think that's the point of glitch maybe. The cover for Mimikry caught my attention.


And now it's raining outside my window. Have a good one!

Edited to add: UTP_ by Alva Noto was for a moment on Friday afternoon, the best music I've ever heard. I wanted to stand in one place and face the sundown and listen to this until it became completely dark

Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto & Ensemble Modern - UTP - Part1

palookas/redbuds

Redbuds in my yard

Bob Dylan, Hard Rain
Mark Richard, House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home
Arthur Doyle & Sunnt Marray, Live At Glenn Miller Café

The palookas who backed him on this tour sure ain't the Band, and the music and arrangements suffer accordingly--these guys are folkies whose idea of rock and roll is rock and roll clichés.
-- Robert Christgau on Hard Rain. He gave it a B-

You ought to meet my cousin Ruth Ann, the oil dealer tells the mother. She's a lot of fun, and she has a daughter they say ought to be tested too.
-- from House of Prayer No. 2

Oh, uh, I'd like to invite my friend and your friend, a very original guy, and uh, very unique and a bit bizzare and strange, but aren't we all in one way or another - he's not a pervert, though; that's why I like him. He's a normal guy.
-- Arthur Doyle introducing "Mr. Nordström" to the stage. It was Bengt Frippe Nordström's last performance before he died.

I don't care if you read this.

Demon cupid from Artemis last week

Wye Oak, Civility
The Beatles, The Beatles

I've been trying to make myself listen to this Wye Oak CD all week now. It's become a meaningless personal challenge, the sort of absurd mission that separates the amateurs from the professionals, and by professional - I've been working on this - means not that you make money at it. You can make money doing a lot of stupid things, in fact I've made the most money in my life doing the stupidest things in that category. Professional, and professor too, find the power in the verb, to profess which is but a letter away from process which is close to progress.

F, C, and G are the three chords upon which most Beatles songs are built. I asked Maya what Beatles song we should learn together and she was markedly cagey about it, but I am not letting it go so she offered up "Dear Prudence." That one is pretty much D F C G with a couple of different G's and D's, none that I can't handle alone; it's just when you string them together is when it gets difficult. I have come to embrace that I am an amateur musician at best and that my professionalism comes in (arguably) after the music is made and released into the world. And when you look at music, writing about it is a bit absurd, meaningless, requiring a profession to do so, whereas the amateur enjoyment of music is practically innate.

I'm not sure what question I'm trying to answer with all this, but I suppose that's why blogging is so enjoyable. It's unabashed. It is amateur and professed. It's open. I supposed I'm answering the NYT blogging is dead article, a haughty pronouncement from a newspaper, but then I haven't read it past the caption where it s says "so-and-so used to blog but he Facebook's now" and I know immediately that they are missing the point, conflating the medium and the verbal state of using that medium. It matters to the medium-providers because they sell you trinkets along life's journey, bags of Cheetos at the gas station on the way to seeing the Grand Canyon of professing yourself into the air.

(This discussion was interrupted by a meeting to talk about changing domains (literally and figuratively) and How We Do Things and then a lunch and discussion about this very thing)

So yeah, I still want to listen to Wye Oak, the spirit is willing but the flesh is week and the clock is running out maybe. Listening (that's all I really do anyway, listen) to "Dear Prudence" backs up my suspicion that the song is both simpler and harder than I think and so is anything I ever profess to want to do and though I will never see a dime off of learning to play "Dear Prudence" with my daughter - unless I come up with a way to sell a story about it - but it will be like all professions, processing, and progressions, a means to transcend these early bounds and see everything from the sky.

--

The Cheetos made me think of something that happened at the grocery store last night: I was filling up the conveyor belt with stuff when I noticed an older black woman in front of me having trouble with her card. They went back and forth while I loaded up things until the cashier presented her with a receipt "It says declined" I was still in my own head when she walked off and I though to ask how much her bill was. "Like $18" said the cashier as she pulled a Coke and a bag of Cheetos and some yogurt for the morning out of her bag. $18 was a drop in the bucket of what I was buying, what I am fortunate to be able to buy for I have gotten that same little recipt from the cashier for a similar bundle, and looked to see if I could catch the lady to pay for it myself, but she'd gone. I felt terrible - an old lady should be able to have Cheetos and a Coke if she wants one at 7:15 at goddamn Wal-Mart - but it was already 7:15, longer than I'd planned to spend in there.

The cashier tried to undo the purchases to ring up my truckload of purchases but the register wouldn't let her. She hollered out for a manager but none came, no one was at the desk. Nothing worked; she didn't know what to do and I had all my stuff sitting there. I'm not sure I could even get it all back into the cart at that point. After 10 more minutes, the guy in line behind me started having some sort of allergy attack. We all needed to get out of here, but a vortex had opened under that old lady being denied her Cheetos. I wanted to just buy her bag of groceries anyway just to get through it, but it was too late for that; we were stuck in the brink until the cashier figured out some way to cancel each item as a seperate order. I thought she was going to break one of her carefully painted nails. I thought the guy behind me was going to start crying, though I guess it was the allergies.

Finally, the system corrected itself and in the tight embrace of equillibrium I was divested of $182 - noting that her $18 would've made the even $200 to which I thought this all would come -  and cast rolling into the night. I don't know what all this says. I don't care if you read this. I wouldn't blame you if you weren't. There are a million horrible facts about myself being revealed in each sentence, I'm sure, and it would probably be in my best interest to not say any of this, but here it is - professed, processed and progressed from.

5 bright things

1. Untitled by David Hammons, from this NYT article. I was a fan of Hammons already but this is some next-level business. It's like a mid-shake Polaroid of the soul.
2. I turned in the first major chunk of my book today and am ready to mow down the remaining pieces. 
3. I started reading Mark Richard's House of Prayer No. 2 on the bus and though I was already a fan, this one is up above my zone, I think. The kind of unique voice you will have trouble not emulating.
4. The new Oxford American is available for those with digital subscriptions, the first general interest issue in quite some time. I don't have anything in it; I'm just saying it looks sharp as hell on the first fly through.
5. My head feels a little like the following video of this bright thing Maya caught at a parade over the weekend. 

The i will be my downfall

Raj Bhog Arati at New Talavan

Yesterday (all old):
Gérard Dôle, Hey Madeline! and Dans les Bayous de la Louisiane (12 New Songs in the Cajun Creole Style)

Today: (all new, via NPR Music except Mike Watt from Spinner, and the last two from... oh, right. You don't care.)
Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring Around My Halo
Mike Watt, Hyphenated Man
Wye Oak, Civilian
The Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck
Drive By Truckers, Go-Go Boots
Thee Oh Sees, Help

Media announcements: In this month's Country Roads: my visit to New Talavan, a Hare Krishna community nestled in the hills of southern Mississippi and a 24-hour musical happening at a church in New Orleans.

You would think I'd be able to type the word "Louisiana" right after about 100 or so times in one manuscript, but nope. I always miss that first i. The i will be my downfall. More like "lose"-iana, amirite?

Oh, I read that excerpt of the posthumous David Foster Wallace book in the New Yorker. It's good but doesn't know when to quit which is why I think DFW is, to me, an unreadable genius. His prose feels like how depression feels, which non-depressed people portray as sad. It isn't; in fact it is as happy as it is sad, it just never is between. It is cripplingly analytical. It's like trapping a giant killer octopus on a merry-go-round and then spinning it hard, thinking that it will turn to butter like the tiger chased around the tree but instead it just gets larger and grows more tentacles and breaks the merry-go-round and now you have a busted merry-go-round to deal with, and when you try to explain why you put the octopus on the merry-go-round to the park authorities and use that tiger-butter analogy because it is perfect! so perfect for this! and they've never heard of it and you send them a link and they don't read it because they don't care why you did it, and for a moment you are relieved because what if the park authority person is black and takes offense at the Little Black Sambo reference, and are all, whew! close shave there, me! and they only asked because they are just required to ask, or maybe never did ask and you felt compelled to explain everything and they write you up a ticket anyway and they don't care about that either and you are like AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! and then the octopus grabs you.

Plus, is the whole book about this kid trying to kiss every inch of his body? Issues....

staring right at me

MF Doom on the bathroom wall. La Monte Young in my ears. The near end of the manuscript on the library table, staring right at me.

La Monte Young on the Internet Archive

progress

The kind of helpful advice I give myself.

Elodie Lauten, Piano Works Revisited
Nico Muhly, Mothertongue
Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, In C Remixed 

It's the start of a rock party, editing-heavy, extended weekend. I took out two simulacrums but added a Gesamtkunstwerk. I can only believe that to be progress.