so Empire it's in ruins

"The Tony" at Marcello's deli

Research Turtles, Research Turtles
Joe Adranga, Fall Back
The Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck

Media: My trip through an eight-course French meal at Madidi's and the complex relationinship between then and now that is Clarksdale, MS appears in the April issue of Country Roads.

I started out pure with Morton Feldman but was led astray into power pop territory and lo, it served me well, for the new Mountain Goats is a thing of beauty. I think I really love their (his) every other record and this is markedly in the Tallahassee/Sunset Tree/Heretic Pride upswing part of the pendulum. Then I was led further stray into pastrami and dijon dressing at my friend Gene's new deli and then good news about a new book project thing came through the wires offering a momentary distraction from the existing one and I've been going on with everyone who will listen about Bret Easton Ellis Empire vs post-Empire thing and my buddy Lance made a good point that Ellis is about as Empire as it gets and the Newsweek in which the story appeared is so Empire it's in ruins.

I thought about that and my Clarksdale article linked above and this new Mountain Goats which infuses Mr. Darnielle's formidable death metal interests, to the point of being produced by a death metal guy I think, yet sounding anything but. The Mountain Goats Sound is a perpetual issue, that jambox informality that established the nascent group as anything but, the fact that the Mountain Goats was just one dude (Darnielle was a pioneer in the fields of the one-guy band) when for at least half a decade, Mountain Goats has been a band that did pretty clean studio records. There is the idea of the thing that attracts us; attraction is after all, an idea itself so it is natural that it gravitates to other ideas - and then there is the messy matter of the reality of that to which the idea leads us, and the best way to address a mess is order. These tidy Mountain Goats albums remind me of going to someone's crappy apartment and yet finding it much better kept than the nicer place you came from, like they have cute curtains and flowers in a vase on the table. As Moe observed when trying to move in on Homer's territory that one time, Hmm... no silverfish.

All I do know is that the sandwich was good and All I Want is a good sandwich place nearby and this album is on its third listen, and All I Want is a good record to listen to and the love of a good woman and good firends and nice weather and a paycheck with some regularity and today I Have It All. Which is how I understand Empire operates.

soul ignorance

All your needs can be met by Dale Warren & the Wattstax '72 Orchestra's "Salvation Symphony".

Media: Slim Harpo Awards Recap, Dirtdobber Blues, and Who is Harry Nilsson? in this week's entry of the Record Crate blog for 225 Magazine. I should really get a new picture taken.


Ike & Tina Turner, Nutbush City Limits
Various Artists, Wattstax: The Living Word

Damn this Wattstax album is good. You probably already knew that and I am once again exposing my general soul ignorance to the cold air of enlightenment. The chill builds character, they say. I had a similar moment during my interview when I failed to immediately recognize a certain song as an Ike & Tina number and took that as an opportunity to make corrective measures. I understand the secret to flying a plane is getting up the in air and then making the little corrections necessary to keep it there until its time to land.

kill at karaoke

It rained and it rained and it rained last night and the old spongy world just took it.

Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Songs: Ohia, Didn't It Rain
Magnolia Electric Co., Fading Trails
The Orchestra Of The S.E.M. Ensemble, Morton Feldman: Turfan Fragments (Thanks ROOT BLOG!)

My friend and esteemed novelist Chris put me on a Songs: Ohia kick this morning. I interviewed former Governor of Ohia Jason Molia ages back and he was perfectly prickly artiste to deal with, kinda how you want someone like him to be unless they have some Keith Richards-grade stories to relate. I say this because I am in the immediate process of coming up with things I have to ask a certain two-hit-wonder from decades past, like he's only got two songs you know, but you know these songs, the kind that my wife deftly pointed out this morning would kill at karaoke. I wonder how "Captain Badass" would do in that arena?



I suspect you'd have to have the right, hip-enough audience and they'd ruin it, plus it is like ten minutes long. That endless build up of the guitar riff and the drums with you just swaying up there, microphone in hand, just feelin' it, would be pretty funny in a Beckett, not funny way. Now that I think about it, I was supposed to go see Godot with Chris a while back and didn't make it and now, just now, ROOT BLOG, internet oracle above all others, posted a recording of Morton Feldman's For Samuel Beckett which I went looking for the other day and never found. I'm liking Molloy, esp. the bit about the farts I posted yesterday; I can see the influence of these novels on a lot of the novels I like even though nobody is really willing to go there like Beckett and when they do, it's terrible. It's like a bad karaoke moment, you just want it to be over and it never is, the opposite of the Beckett stasis where you want something to happen and it never starts. None of these concurrences mean much and none of this is helping me come up with interview questions, but I'm scretly hoping that he'll say that one massive power ballad, the one to which you made out with someone in a church basement or darkened skating rink, was inspired by the sense of loss (emotional and physical) in Krapp's Last Tape and if he does, I'll let out a little shriek loud enough you'll hear it over the rain. But don't count on it happening.

EX(T)ERMINAT(E) THE CAKE!

So far my birthday has manifested as a mile of Facebook well-wishes, a Lil' Rascals-meets-Dr. Who card slipped into my library book, Tom T. Hall, coffee and bacon cheese toast. Not bad, 42!

Tom T. Hall, The Essential Tom T. Hall: Story Songs
Will & the Bushmen, Gawk
Jay Farrar, Terroir Blues
Pere Ubu, Dub Housing
Samuel Beckett, Molloy

One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it's not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. it's nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It's unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics help you know yourself.
- from Molloy

I haven't thought of Will Kimbrough for two decades or so before seeing him at Chelsea's last Friday, but it was so nice of him to write this song about me! For my birthday! I won't drown in emotion and die, I promise!

Artificially sweetened

Artificially sweetened, sure, but the azaleas all kinda look like this right now.

Alva Noto, Utp_
William Basinski, Variations for Piano and Tape
Nurit Tilles, David Mahler: Only Music Can Save Me Now
Todd Reynolds, Outerborough
Kurt Elling, The Gate
Cowboy Junkies, Demons

Left the leafy lindens and sluggish Spree, the breakfast of sausages and cheeses and breads that stretched like communist boulevards into late afternoon, the stretch-denim legs of the artist girls pedaling home from their studios on paint-splattered single-speeds, the syrupy strong coffees the Kurdish diaspora made by midnight at my corner café and its resident narcoleptic who'd roll tomorrow's cigarettes for me, ten smokes for two euros.

A great sentence from Joshua Cohen's "Emission" in the Paris Review 196

I AM ROCK 'N' ROLL!

NGC 2169, otherwise known as the "37 cluster"

Philip Glass, Akhnaten

Yesterday I was shockingly productive despite my best pouty efforts to not be. 3000 words of bar analysis laid to digital print, side shrub thing weeded, I was on the radio talking about Oxford American and my forthcoming book, went to Groovin' on the Grounds, outdoor concert thing on campus that once upon a time was a cool deal - remember that year when Rev. Horton Heat tore it up at a baseball diamond and wasn't Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on the bill too?

Now we got OneRepublic as the headliners and Steel Magnolia - manifesting as a variety band but I think they don't view themselves as such. Or maybe that's now an irrelevant concern, a holdover from pre-karaoke, Empire times. I got the impression that they'd seen Scissor Sisters on Glee and had a That Is Rock And Roll moment. To each his and her corny own, but it reminded me of when Pet Shop Boys had Liza Minelli as a guest on a track and she remarked to Frank Sinatra something like "Frank, they want me to do rock 'n' roll now" and Frank was all, "Toots, you are rock 'n' roll!" and I feel like I just lost valuable hit points in merely remembering and relating that anecdote. Let this substitute for any neglected breast-tearing about the passing of Elizabeth Taylor on my part. "Steel Magnolia", though? "Fried Green Tomatoes" wasn't available as a band name?

We also squoze in a trip to the observatory where they were checking out the above numerological anomaly nestled somewhere in Orion's pants area. Imagine the sweet stoner astronomer trying to explain what he swears he saw the next morning. "No, asshole, it was a '37', like the numbers!" frantically tracing them in the air for his unbelieving roommates chuckling over their cereal.



Speaking of numbers in the sky, I turn 42 this week and as of last Wednesday am at the brink of under 200 for the first time in at least a decade. I don't know if there is cosmic significance in either, but the numbers don't lie. I ran the obstacle course shown below with Maya and didn't have a heart attack. Not just outside with my phone but inside the bouncy-bounce vinyl arena itself! Twice! Y'heard, Frank Sinatra? I AM ROCK 'N' ROLL!

Any dumbass could die

Ray Davies accepting his Slim Harpo award via video.

Junip, Fields
The Psychedelic Furs, Talk Talk Talk and Book of Days and Forever Now

"Pretty in Pink" is a much deeper song than the 80's retro patina it carries will allow. It has more than a bit of Reed/Springsteen look-through-this-person's-eyes-through-my-eyes narrative depth, and bit of those two artists' hokey populist anthemics happening, genuine clasic hooks sitting like a juicy hamburger in the middle of Talk Talk Talk's banquet of comparatively more difficult cuisine. I loved the first two P-Furs albums back then, but I loved a lot of other things best left to the past.



"No Tears" followed by "Mr. Jones", though, that's the stuff. I can still picture the little pink bootleg tape I bought from that dude with the stand in the French Quarter and the crunch of the gravel in the school parking lot and my friends and

so good so far
slow down ha ha
movie stars and ads
and radio (something something)
don't turn it on
i don't wanna DIE

in our worst snotty fake British accents and so what if the real lyric was "i don't wanna dance". We did actually want to dance - it's what new wave boys did - it's dying that we didn't want to do. Any dumbass could die.

I have things to say about the Slim Harpo awards - the Baton Rouge blues awards ceremony I attended last night, but I will let that set until the 225 blog next week. What I will say it was a lot of fun as was a surprise show by Will Kimbrough at Chelsea's to accompany Cyril E. Vetter
signing for Dirtdobber Blues and that someone from the press said they saw my book on the Spring 2012 list and said "So it's really real!" and, hey, stuff is! I'm into it like a train!



Ed. to add: Maya did this drawing of John Lennon with a spent incense stick, and I know I'm being one of those parents, but, c'mon! Conceptually sound!