"boo fries"

My madeleine is an actual madeleine.

Jacks, tracks from Vacant World on YouTube
dos, Justamente Tres
Jonathan Richman, Jonathan, Te Vas A Emocionar! 
Samuli Kosminen, Kimmo Pohjonen, and Kronos Quartet, UnikoChiara String Quartet & Matmos, Jefferson Friedman: Quartets

1. I got an Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronnno cookie at Pocorello's today and it made me think how my father would always have a tin of those around and I'd sneak one and it was like eating the best sugar cone-without-the-ice cream ever, a luxury somehow more luxuriant than eating the same cone with ice cream.
2. I have the windows open and dos (bass duo of Mike Watt and Kira who's-it from Black Flag) playing and a bird whistling along with their low warble and it is more gorgeous than it should be.
3. I really like the new beta version of Rhapsody. It's got a Pandora-ish ease of use and the linking is pretty easy as well.
4. I never think look at the key word searches that bring someone to this blog. The number two search after my own name for the last month is "boo fries."
5. I just mapped out another book on scrap paper on my desk. I do this a lot, but I usually do this in a  blank Word document: like, make a pretend title page with the title in a suitably title-ish font and size. Eras Bold ITC, 36-point is good for the title, with the subtitle in 26 point. It looks like the title page of a 60's novel, one of those you should've read by now but haven't. Just big enough to be A Book. Then I leave it open on my desktop for a couple of days to see if it still looks good when I forget about it and click it back to life. But I never do it on scrap paper, and I really like the scrap paper form of it. Maybe if I leave them both on my desk, the book will write itself. Maybe whatever the book is about, I should call it Boo Fries. That + my name will bring in the readers in droves. The title I have on my fake title pages is not so far off from Boo Fries; maybe I should be open to this shift.

simple matter

Following my daughter around on our mutual new bikes with T. Rex blaring from my phone like a transistor radio feels like the 1970's childhood I had in my alternate universe childhood.

T. Rex, The Slider (three times I think)
Boston Composers String Quartet, Complete String Quartets of Leon Kirchner
Sandro Perri, Plays Polmo Polmo
Kurt Elling, The Gate

The manuscript got submitted to the above soundtrack; now it's the simple matter of myself and a bunch of other people turning it into a real book by next Spring.

Trembling!

Black Francis, The Golem
T. Rex, The Slider
Hound Dog Taylor, Natural Boogie

1. Backyard Spring grill dinner!
2. I got a free bike for the asking on Facebook!
3. I am in the home stretch with the book, like I will be finished with the writing and my end of the editing tonight!
4. You know that recent Black Francis album The Golem that you didn't listen to? Me either, but I did last night! It's great!
5. I am manning a table at Maya's school today for this scholastic Olympics thing and she told her teacher that I am "trembling with excitement to do it!" I am! In general! Trembling!

quantum aberration

Here is my daughter doing figure 8's on her new bike to illustrate "my" "point."

Cheap Trick, Dream Police
Junip, Fields
Dickie Landry, Fifteen SaxophonesPanda Bear, Tomboy
Walter "Wolfman" Washington, On the Prowl
I had a dream last night that "Dream Police" was stuck in my head, a thing so meta that I fear it might cause some sort of quantum aberration, a time-travel incident that forever changes everything from that point on. I am on the lookout to see if everything is "different" in "the world" "now." That's what happens when you have quantum aberration dreams, you have to start putting things in quotes. Like, what do I mean when I say "now"; is it a "now," this-moment-in-time now or a "different" now based on this new course of events and the former universe in which we all once lived is orphaned off in the ether? Or does it keep going? Or does it even "exist" or are we "it?" See, it's like being trapped in a conversation with "that guy" at a  cocktail party and I "am" that guy. And the other guy. And the party. And there are no cocktails.

run to the hills

Trippy... the digital went crazy during Rango. There should be a moratorium on declaring digital things to be "a bunch of 1's and 0's" as if that is some sort of meaningful reduction implying a oneness/managability accessible through this astute observation. It is like saying any words on any page are just paper and ink and therefore anyone should be able to understand and create them. Music is just vibrations in the air. Cathedrals are but another arrangement of bricks.

Small Faces, Small Faces
Cheap Trick, In Color
The whole last LCD Soundsystem show at Madison Square Graden on YouTube
Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden

I'm convinced this playlist will make perfect sense and possibly even create a new thing in the negative space after the fact. I can already see its precsence taking shape as logic/taste recedes from the locus. The parting of stage curtains creates a universe and their closing ceases its tenure. Or something. I'm tired and not ready for the tangibles before me this week. Cheap Trick understands. Eddie understands. I'ma get to it before I run to the hills.


Maya had her first crack at band practice this weekend. I already like it more than the new Panda Bear record.

in Just-/spring

Hopefully everyone knows the e.e. cummings poem "in Just-/spring" (scroll down a ways) and I don't mean that in a you should know this one way, but that I hope life has brought it your way at some point. It's just that not too long ago I mentioned the goat-footed balloonman to someone I was sure would get it and they never had, so here. Happy Sacre du printemps.

Ed to add: and Happy National Poetry Month. I read poems last year and it didn't kill me, in fact it may have made me stronger, so I'll do it again this year. And so should you!

The grass has been mowed by the wee Beatlemaniac/Warcrafter under the most ineffective of pre-teen surly protests twice now and it feels like a bridge has been mutually crossed, old Goat-foot leading the charge, and when all seems like our compass points to "lost", she leave me this next to the drum kit.




She came back all "Well? Did you do your quest?" and I was like "What quest?" and she was all "OH! I forgot to write that part on the back!" and off she went in search of a pen.

The following songs are my weekend:




I had more, but it was just announced "You must do the quest or the end of time will reach!" So, OK, sheesh! I'm off the computer!

the stink eye from a mama dove

Gettin' the stink eye from a mama dove in our camellia tree.

Keith Frank & the Soileau Zydeco Band, Ready or Not
Oblivians, ...Play 9 Songs with Mr. Quintron
Reigning Sound, Time Bomb High School
The Psychedelic Furs, Talk Talk Talk
The Chameleons UK, What Does Anything Mean, Basically?

Shameless self-promotion: "Blister in le Soleil: The Lost Bayou Ramblers and Gordon Gano" in the April 2011 issue of Offbeat. Also, in the April issue of 225 Magazine, "Festival Time!" - a 10,000 ft view of the festival season and quick picks for French Quarter Fest, Jazz fest, FestForAll, Festival International and the Baton Rouge Blues Festival. I am gator-on-a-stick-ready.

It's been busy around here. The "good kind of busy" as they say, though I find myself a little furtive like the mama dove up there, wondering what you are up to over by my nest like that, knowing there isn't a whole lot I can do about it should you go for the eggs. It's really not as desperate or fearful as that sounds, though you wonder if a bird really fears things, or do they just know how things go down with eggs a lot of the time.

This song made it all better.



There was a German exchange student named Rick who put this song on a tape "Rick's Mix" which he gave me (or I "borrowed") and about which I wrote a rather embittered story and now I'm wondering why because he really was nothing but cool to me generally and I was transferring, because that's what you do as a teenager, or at least is what I did. But the story is luminously bitter. Maybe I was trying "harsh" on for size when I wrote it, and I'm all sweetness and light now. Anyway, Chameleons UK FTW TGIF XOXO.