fat ass tomato

Hello, fat ass tomato! So nice of you to make an appearance in my garden. You should invite some of your blooming produce friends to join you.

Matmos, Supreme Balloon
Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
Beck, Guerolito
DJ Spooky, Dubtometry

They should made a variety of tomato called "Fat Ass Tomato". It'd look adorable at the plant store.

Her plums were ripe and her garden full of roses.

In Patagonia bursts with jewels like that sentence, in this case describing an old woman making tarts at a little table, virtually paralized after being stranded in water up to her neck at that very table during a flood.



Here is what an edited manuscript looks like. It looks eerily like an undeited one except someone has made little marks in pencil all over it, kinda like hobo signs revealing a hidden navigation by strangers of an otherwise familiar neighborhood. It's also better than an unedited one because it means at least one other person is physically able to get through it.

It was Samuel Beckett's birthday and on that ocassion I heard that he had been the neighbor to a young Andre the Giant, a child so huge that Beckett's truck was often enlisted to ferry the boy to school. Good company!

I offered my face to the black mass of fragrant vegetation that was mine and with which I could do as I pleased and never be gainsaid.
-from Molloy

around which was formed the pearl

Flowers!

Bill Callahan, Apocalypse (twice, streaming at 3Voor12)
Dean & Britta, 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol's Screen Tests
David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights, Left By Soft (streaming at Paste)
TV on the Radio, Nine Types of Light

Media: Country Roads teased my forthcoming story on the hidden world of local delis, thus teasing the rest of the story out of me, and in the 225 blog: Crystal Stils, Bass Drum of Death, Beass Bed/Feufollet, and Earth Day activities this weekend. Wet Willie is playin', y'all!

Speaking of media, the first of the expert reader comments for my book are in and they don't hate it! They serve to make it stronger! It's a delicate balance, this culture writing thing, especially when the subject has a stake in the depiction. I personally hope to get it as well as Gimme a Break did  in their Mardi Gras episode. (embedding verboten, ff to the 10:00 mark)

What gorgeous things are Dean & Britta's soundtracks for the Warhol screen tests. They are some of those things that are nothing and in that, are everything.


"Ann Buchanan Theme"


"Herringbone Tweed" (Dennis Hopper)

And Jeez Louise, David Kilgour is forever, similarly, ephemerally good. His late-70's New Zealand punk band the Clean was the grain of sand around which was formed the pearl of Galaxie 500 and Luna and Yo La Tengo and the cough syrup rock in general by all those bands that were supposedly influenced by the Velvet Underground but were secretly influenced by the Clean.

Speaking of cough syrup...and National Poetry Month...

Three loofah poems
by Shiki, 1902. Loofah was a sap ingested to aleviate coughs. These were the last poems that Shiki would write. From Japanese Death Poems.

The loofah blooms and
I, full of phlegn
Become the Buddha

A barrelful of phlegm -
Even loofah water
Will not avail me now

Loofah water
From two days ago
Left untouched

lily

Gaze into me, says the lily iris.

Moon Duo, Escape
Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
Delicious, hopelessly unwieldly falafel sandwich at Atcha
Bass Drum of Death, GB City
The Black Angels, Phosphene Dream
Crystal Stilts, In Love With Oblivion
Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest (I'm white like @BretEastonEllis!)
Samuli Kosminen, Kimmo Pohjonen, and Kronos Quartet, Uniko



I'ma use you up, says the bee.

the Xanadu orgy of their nothingness

Manhatta (1921) by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. Via Weimar. Many YouTube commenters are worked up about the non-original soundtrack. I happen to think Eno's Thursday Afternoon is an apt if bland choice and prefer letting Moon Duo (via aworks) do the sonic lifting.

The Killing
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Rene Hell, Porcelain Opera (via Pretty Goes With Pretty)
Moon Duo, Mazes

I finished the first half of Molloy, where old Molloy frets around in one hundred-page paragraph around on his crutches in his apartment, sucking on little stones and contemplating his butthole. It's pretty good. The second half is the interior monologue of a detective looking for Molloy, though Lord knows why. Beckett has this way of being compelling by being completely not-compelling. It's not unlike dating crazy girls; nothing's happening but you are right there completely in the middle of all that nothing, you alone in the Xanadu orgy of their nothingness.

Speaking of orgies of nothingness, I read through the first story in a collection I think I want to do next. The title story that gives the collection its conceptual conceit and everything's good about it but the writing. I think its because I'm "trying something out" rather than just telling it. Or it might just be a bad story or I might just be bad at telling it. Anyway, it's something to suck on, like a little stone.

By the way, Moon Duo is my all-time favorite band ever of this moment. I have loved them forever since right now and will listen to no one else until it's over.


Moon Duo, "When You Cut"

the matter of "mattering"

Rockpile, Seconds of Pleasure
Fugazi, In On the Kill Taker

Joe Bonomo asked on his Facebook for the most exciting 45 seconds of rock 'n' roll and among the nominations I put up (the opening to the Stooges' "Search and Destroy", almost all of "Pay to Cum" by Bad Brains) I feel strongest about the beginning of Fugazi's "Facet Squared". It is a teenage nuclear submarine locking target and firing all torpedoes. I'm supposed to do a guest lecture in a class about 10 albums that matter and through that, the matter of "mattering" and I was going to put it all together over the weekend but I kept getting in the water and no matter how cold it was, it felt better than thinking about records.  So here I am, torpedoes on lock ready to fire away. Pride no longer has definition/Everybody wears it, it always fits/A state invoked for the lack of position. Hm. I don't know about all that. I like the sound of music more than the words. That opening,though. I should make that my alarm, and then set an alarm. Then get to it.

Meatball poboy

Coffee. Target for new bike helmet. Long bike ride. "Italian Lover" sandwich. Meatball poboy (my new rapper name). Botanical gardens, with irises going full blast. Coffee. Park to help friend release turtle into the lake. Free kayaking at the lake! Free paddle-surfboarding at the lake! Wipeout of the paddle-surfboarder at the lake! Free t-shirts from the free kayaking and paddle-surfboard providers. Different park. Kids disappointed at missing the wipeout. Dads next to me discussing Cuba and the Middle East. Maybe the first non-conservative collection of white playground dads in East Baton Rouge Parish history, but I'm not really listening that close. Kids discussing the Beatles and Jack Black and the Beatles again. Keep hoping the coffee truck shows up. Their kids are pussies, complaining of sweating and being dirty. Mine are actually sweaty and dirty and occupied in their inner worlds. Scratch that- they just walked up complaining of being sweaty, but want to go home to make mudpies, so that's something at least.

Me Impertube

In response, Walt Whitman's "Me Impertube" from Leaves of Grass

Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things,
Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they,
Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought,
Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the Tennessee, or far north or inland,
A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life of these States or of the coast, or the lakes or Kanada,
Me wherever my life is lived,
O to be self-balanced for contingencies,
To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.