fun city

Somebody just found out about the free Photoshop iPhone app. Prepared to be underwhelmed with my on-the-go photo editing techniques! I really would like to unhinge my blogging habit from the computer but so far, I've seen no easy way to combine Flickr + YouTube + Rhapsody links + basic text editing on a mobile device alone for Blogger (and by extension, whatever blogging platform one uses) and maybe that is an opportunity. 

Brad Lubman & Ensemble Resonanz, Julia Wolfe: Cruel Sister
Brad Lubman & New Millennium Ensemble, Morton Feldman: For Frank O'Hara, etc.


Beacause, truthfully, YouTube swtched how they do embeded videos (iframes rather than embeded controls, which distributes the actual control and puts the traffic more squarely in their world, which makes sense, for as much sense as the continued free existence of YouTube makes)  doesn't act right with the Blogger rich-text editor, which either means nothing to you and you've wandered over somewhere to watch handsome shirtless men play basketball , or if you are tech-leaning and this implies an embarassing primitivity to my blogging methods. So, yeah, I'm thinking. But for now, iPhone-toshopping is fun city.


Like this, I have to go into HTML mode to just make the image posting happen in a satifactory manner. What a world in which I dwell and what problems that world suffers! I like how the filament in the solar yard light resbembles two people considering an embrace. Oh and Goodreads! I almost forgot about Goodreads! It's another pain in the ass!

Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Reviewed at my blog



Speaking of suffering worlds, I finished Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas last night dimly lit on the couch by the dull glow of iBooklight, which is even necessary in the daytime, for the content (endless wandering through a catastrophized town) and artifact (black text on faux water-stained pages; cover emulating a destroyed library book) of Scorch Atlas' drowned, mud-caked, pustulent endgame world is so unrelenting, it absorbs all light you have for it. It bears the same adolescent Apocalypse fantasies that all sci-fi writers do in fiction and Tea Party adherents do in real life: it creates a world where no one will help you, literal helplessness, where the poor bastards that do not succumb to disaster by drowning and architectural collapse -it takes a degree of separating oneself from the recent catastrophe in Japan, and memories of Katrina to take fiction of this sort in - are worse off to live in a world of literal and metaphoric shit.

The easy comparison is The Road, but Scorch Atlas is not about keeping the flame, nor does it possess that book's grace. It is more like Flan, an absurd escatalogical novel by Stephen Tunney (aka Dogbowl of King Missile fame) except that there is almost no apprent humor in Butler's damnation of mankind. Which, turns out, is good; the humor in Flan kinda isn't funny - it becomes an endurance test, an uncomfortable purgatory of watching Pee Wee's Playhouse on repeat until you can see the cruel, animal fear in Chairy's saucer-like eyes. Scorch Atlas is instead a meditation on suffering, the perceived mutation of just being a young person being projected onto a universe ill-equipped to manifest that kind of self-loathing. Critics will call it pretentious and precious, which it is, but just like that mealy, jittery runaway crouched at the bus stop, it is those predicatble things and yet still unpredictably dangerous. Fun stuff!
View all my reviews


Here is a dude burning his copy as part of some sort of web contest on Bulter's part, and in response to the book itself.

I read a little bit of Beckett's Molloy last night after, just to keep the human degradation party train going and came across this little illuminating passage:

Constipation is a sign of good health in pomeranians.

See? Now, that's funny! And easy to post.

Schienenzeppelin

Sun Ra Arkestra performing on East German TV in 1986, as discussed on The 6th Floor of the New York Times. Boing Boing has a story about the Schienenzeppelin, a 1930's German train that flew down the tracks via an airplane propeller mounted on the front of the engine.

Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas
tUnE-yArDs, w h o k i l l
Morton Feldman, Voices and Instruments
Bill Callahan, "Baby's Breath" from ApocalypseThe Moore Brothers, Aptos
Daniel Goyone, Etranges manèges

Media: In this week's Record Crate blog for 225: R.I.P. Pinetop Perkins, a re-release for Baton Rouge blues legend Henry Gray, and the Slim Harpo Awards this Thursday.

Outside of that, I got nothing.

It serves you right to suffer

Pinetop Perkins, On Top
John Lee Hooker, It Serves You Right to Suffer
Bukka White, Sky Songs

I wrote a thing about Pinetop Perkins' passing and the Truth of boogie-woogie but it got funnelled into my 225 blog for tomorrow, so you're gonna have to wait. It serves you right to suffer. What I took out is that boogie-woogie is not my favored quadrant of the blues; I prefer how John Lee Hooker pounds on that nail until it is flush with the coffin wood and how Bukka White will keep playing as long as you got magnetic tape
and then some extended train metaphors that no one needs to hear.

After hearing that Morton Feldman's String Quartet is six hours long, I need to hear it. That's how bad my train metaphors were; someone needs to hear a six hour relatively event-less string quartet, that someon being myself, but no one needs to hear one lousy train metaphor. It's a quality/quantity schism that plagues every writer. I also want to read one of those Beckett novels, the ones that are like locust-words chomping on your synapses but I'm not going to do that yet either.


Acclaimed film director Jim Jarmusch reads Samuel Beckett's ominous libretto to Morton Feldman's Neither and talks about the influence these men had on his work.

Beckett wrote the libretto for Feldman's Neither, one of the pieces being played along with an ecstatic circus of a John Zorn piece by/at City Opera in NYC and if I could, I'd be extra-there. I have a good John Zorn story too, but I'll let that one rest as well. I might go get Feldman's For Samuel Beckett from the library, in case I was leaving you in too much suspense.

let the seperatist cult run with the ball!

Nam June Paik, "The Medium is the Medium"

Big Love series finale
The Fall, Room to Live: Undilteable Sang Truth!
The Durutti Column, Treatise on the Steppenwolf
Frog Eyes, Ego Scriptor
The Weekend*, House of Balloons (free mixtape)

God only knows when Natalie Maines' version of "God Only Knows" from the closing credits of Big Love's bow-out will leave my head. I'm trying to view this endgame through some irony Moebius where the greed and the bourgeoisie hypocrasies of the leads (Barb and Bill) become manifest with teh cute one getting her inevitable freedom and poor old Nicki remaining in the pawn role into which she was born. Bill's "I started this church for you when you got ex-communicated" thing and then Barb's refusal to join and then swoopingin at the end and getting everything she wanted is ice cold wrapped in HBO TV warmth. I just can't quite tell if that was the intention given how ham-fisted the final season has been. If you are going to turn a decent show into a batshit soap opera, let the seperatist cult run with the ball! I mean, Alby neatly couldn't escape from jail or at least make bail? C'mon! Ugh. Albyites everywhere are displeased with these events, and no amount of moral toil will set this right. Stupid TV.


Nam June Paik, from "Global Groove"

I went searching last night for a particular Nam June Paik video where he talks about penetrating the vagina of a whale (I don't think he does it; the text is accompanied by his run-magnets-over-the-screen shtick), and I'm in the awkward position of possibly accepting that I made up such a thing. I could swear I saw it late in my adolescence on Night Flight, circa 1983.

A friend of mine used to live in an artist warehouse place in Cincinnati that was above the loft where Nam June Paik's giant TV robots were built. There were a million busted TV sets everywhere and one druken night, we stopped the scary freight elevator on that floor and peered into a disued room with a dirt floor, with TV's half-buried everywhere, and the flouresecnt light overhead desperately flickered, like it was a distress signal blipped out over those broken dead TV's and it was so powerful. My friend said it was hell but I think it was a creepier living purgatory thing going on. Now I'm wondering if I made that up too.

Anyway, what I was really getting to is the Moebius strip thing with its infinity/ouroboros/predictability/video loop/culture loop/everything loop thing and here is this cheery Robert Whitman video.


Robert Whitman, "Moebius Strip"


And hey, groove on John Whitney's "Catalog" from 1961 with me. I've never heard of him either!


Love me some Robert Whitman. He was also an early pioneer in video art who rose to fame when he projected a film of a girl taking a shower into an actual running shower, which I still think is one of the best ideas ever.

* The band is called the Weeknd, without the third e. I'm already annoyed before even listening to it.

the first Super Bowl in the United States!

I love this town. We went to the State Capitol to see the azaleas and went on our generally annual trip to the observation deck to see the city from on high.



One of the guards up there waved us over, excitedly pointing to the other guard, "Look at this guy! Played in the first Super Bowl in the United States!" and suddenly former Kansas City Chief (and Brown and Raider) Frank Pitts was showing us his Super Bowl I ring. I still wasn't really sure what was going on when he took them off for my wife to hold and get a closer look. I managed a quick video.



But serious, how sweet is the world that a guy who won the first Super Bowl just hands over his rings to look at and has a cake job like guarding the observation deck over that world, and that another old man guard has a buddy like this to heap his excitement on.

Saturday night I went to an excellent reading at this art gallery/warehouse space, the kind of thing that you don't think happens here and turns out the Blake Butler reading was the hyper-productive Blake Butler of HTMLGIANT. He wrote a great creepy piece about (I think) an online chat session. I wrote a piece on that website once and figured he wouldn't remember it but either he did or played it off well that he did. I bought his exquisite eschatology bummer Scorch Atlas; so metal is this take of a blackened, dying, diseased world (perhaps made this way by some sort of super-moon) that the page ends are painted black and the leaves printed with gray water stains. Fun! The Alan Lomax biography continues to be luminous.



Saturday day was the St. Patrick's Day parade and Chicago style dogs and boutique, you-gotta-know-the-lady-to-get-them desserts and green hair spray. Azaleas! Sport peppers! Beads! Excuse me, trying to shoot a video here! Love this town!

plagued

The colour of spring, right outside my window

Kimmo Pohjonen, accordion; Samuli Kosminen, percussion, electronics Kronos Quartet, Uniko
Efterklang, Magic Chairs
Talk Talk, The Colour of Spring


Talk Talk, "Living in Another World." Our haircuts plagued us back then, but it was worth it. We persevered and became stronger for it.

Hold my beer while I jump this gator pond!

Undertsatement, like the alligator, runs free at Avery Island

John Szwed, Alan Lomax: the Man Who Recorded the World 
Badfinger, Wish You Were Here
The Posies, Frosting on the Beater
Matthew Sweet, 100% Fun
The New Pornographers, Together

They started in new Iberia, and stayed overnight at Avery Island, home of McIlhenny's Tobasco sauce, as guests of E.A. McIlhenny, the owner, and something of of a folksong collector himself, as he gathered Negro spirituals and claimed to know the songs of the Eskimos. Over the next few weeks they would wander through Delcambre, Erath, Kaplan, Indian Bayou, Morse, Crowley, Jennings, and White Oak recording track-lining songs, string bands, accordion-driven waltzes, and songs of failed courtships and lovers who ran away.

The they being Alan Lomax and his dad John Lomax in the mid 1930's, on page 56 of the Lomax biography. They are just about to meet Leadbelly at Angola and all find their future audiences. It is humbling to see that one of my heroes almost eighty years earlier went to some of the same places for his book that I've gone for mine. Young Alan Lomax, swaeating through the malaria and gonherria, laments that, even as far back as the 30's, Cajun culture was on the wane, being usurped by the rise of western swing's dancehall dominance, something that is still in the fragile process of being rectified.

Anyway, I read the illuminating Leadbelly chapter last night and was all set to get my scratchy field recording on this morning, but the press of spring instead proclaimed in stars writ out in pollen that it is Power Pop Friday, where we don't care where or when anything came from and we just wanna JetSki down the lazy Party Cove of the day! Hold my beer while I jump this gator pond!


The Posies, "Dream All Day". I too wanna throw my porkpie hat at the camera of those that prevent me from always dreaming!

Diego Rivera, Frozen Assets, 1931

This post about NYC on Weimar is stunning. It's why we Internet.


And this. Marie Osmond explaining Dada and reciting a Hugo Ball sound poem. Bravo for unearthing this, Art Fag City!