5 things about yesterday

Great kite weather we're having.

Wayne Shorter, The Soothsayer
Joe Henderson, Page One
Chet Baker, The Italian Sessions
Art Blakey, Roots & Herbs
Charles Mingus, Blues & Roots
Eddie "Jockjaw" Davis, Trane Whistle

1. Media: in this week's 225 blog, another mention about Jeanne Leiby's passing, the new Gorillaz album, and the roots rock offerings in town next week.
2. Yesterday was pretty "linky" for me between the Steely Dan thing and Jeanne. A number of fond memories about Jeanne are coming in on the comments. It all leaves me a little off balance. I don't really have that fierce a dog in the Steely Dan hunt, but it is fun to kick the ideas around and in the kicking, bigger things are occasionally unearthed. Jeanne and I weren't close on a personal level, yet my interactions with her on a writerly/professional level had the kind of kineticism that you can lose when things are too personal. She was really good at that quick inspiration and I like to think I'm good at that too and so we had a mutual admiration society with that as its charter.
3. Death has a way of making everything else around it seem flimsy and stupid, but I suppose it's those flimsy, stupid things like talking about bands and all that give life its poignancy and the blow of death comes from that sudden vacuum. The lightness is for a moment sucked out of the situation and heaviness naturally assumes its momentary place. Unemotional, nonspiritual Law of Thermodynamics business at play.
4. For instance: it was heartwarming to see people post well wishes on her Facebook wall as if she was still alive - and in a grand virtual sense, is still alive. Words have their own way of living and I suppose that's why we are compelled to say something in the face of events.
5. But then there was a thud to see a posting from Jeanne yesterday about the Michigan governor. Facebook has no break between this plane and the next, nor is there protocol for throwing things across the breach as there is in real life (and death), and I like that lack of protocol. They say the Internet fractures us, distances us from our social selves, and maybe it does, but it also bolsters us against the natural hesitancies we have around the Void, allowing emptiness to sit naturally next to the visceral, like they are old friends, like that "it's all 1's and 0's" cliche about digital things I hate but am now employing, just because I have to say something.

R.I.P. Jeanne Leiby

Detail of the cover for the Autumn 2010 issue of the Southern Review

It is saddening and shocking to report the sudden unexpected death of a friend, writer, editor, and idea woman, Jeanne Leiby. Jeanne appeared on the scene only recently to steer the Southern Review, LSU's revered literary journal, through the choppy waters of contemporary writing and under her watch, it became suddenly a better, more vibrant thing. She and I became friends after a reading in their former offices, and over a series of quick lunches hatched ideas. Let's do a reading series! Write me an essay on that! Review this book for me! These are things that Jeanne asked me to do for her, for the Review, and for myself.

I came to realize that Jeanne was quick to do that with everyone, to throw a match at every potential fuse with hopes that something would spark up. None of the things she asked of me came to fruition, for myriad reasons, but none of that mattered, for the idea of them existed indelibly in the world, and that, if nothing else, is what a writer, what a reader, what an editor, what an idea woman does. Those ideas still hang in the air, reverberating with her nervous zeal; she was a transplanted Michiganite and her step-to-it Midwesternness offered a much needed counterpoint to the narcissistic Southern malaise.

Jeanne would call people to tell them a piece was accepted. I thought that was classy as hell.

I haven't read Jeanne's book Downriver, but I will. I haven't written that book review she wanted, but I will, even if she's no longer around to want it or to forget that she ever asked for it and ask for something else in the process. Jeanne was a civic-minded person, so as details get sorted out, I suspect there will be some sort of donation, and I'll do that too. But, I suppose the best way to honor an idea woman like Jeanne is to write something, read something, submit something, talk about something, do something and OK, Jeanne, I will.

If you need me, I'll be in the bomb shelter

Steely Dan, Aja
Don Breithaupt. Aja
Donald Fagen, The Nightfly
Dave Brubeck Quartet, Countdown: Time in Outer Space

I think the Steely Dan Smackdown broadcast went well; I haven't listened to it yet; so far two people in the comments think I'm an idiot so I must've gotten my points across. Thanks to the folks at WNYC's Soundcheck and to the total pro to my con Eric Deggans for doing it.

I prepped with about two days of solid Aja-ing, even read the dizzying, comprehensive 33 1/3 book on the album and still came away unconvinced of its unparalleled greatness. Which is to say, it's not a bad record, but I just don't see it as the best thing since plastic-wrapped, lite jazz ennui. I had spare bon mots at the ready: Sure "Peg" is catchy, but so is hantavirus. etc.

As happens with any continued exposure to a well-heeled virus, I can't stop listening to them now.  I started to put on some earth scorching Scandinavian metal or Aja's co-inductee the National Recording Registry, Capt. Beefheart & the Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica to flush  it out of my system, but my infection instead had me put on The Nightfly and would follow it with that post-Aja album they did  Woody Herman and Chick Corea if it could be readily sourced. Feed a fever...


"Kid Charlemagne" from Chick, Donald, Walter & Woodrow


I did always like the video for "New Frontier" even when I hated the song. If you need me, I'll be in the bomb shelter with my Brubeck records and my Picasso poster.

Ed. to add, here is the broadcast if you missed it:

Feeding the Monkey in My Soul

Media: Tomorrow I will be on WNYC's Soundcheck Smackdown, talking about Steely Dan's Aja and why it is a lousy choice for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry with another critic who feels the exact opposite about it. The producers of the show came across the posts on my old blog about listening to the Steely Dan catalog to find what apparently everybody sees in the band I once callously described as "an embodiment of saccharine plasticity and an acceptance that The Dream is dead." Apparently no one else would fess us to not loving the hell out of Steely Dan. Should be fun!

Come hear me joust the cocaine-powered windmills of the 70's on WYNC 93.3 FM/ AM 820 in the New York City area or online, Tuesday, April 19, 2010, around 2pm EST/1pm CST

The World

Bring on the light spring reading! Between the Beckett dubious-existence-athon and Campbell's meth vignettes, I suck in the fragrance of the Earth's bounty as long as my sinuses will allow. I'm using to bookmark Malone Dies a creepy insert card for some oldie-olderson heart medication that fell out of a copy of Smithsonian. He knows what darkness in your heart lies. Somehow it gets to Beckett's point(lessness) quicker and bears a more pronounced sense of existential dread than does the text.

The White Stripes, Icky Thump
Dickie Landry, Fifteen Saxophones
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage 
Alex V. Cook, Louisiana Saturday Night: Looking for a Good Time in South Louisiana's Juke Joints, Honky Tonks, and Dance Halls


I had the first boiled crawfish of the season out by my buddy John's pool from Ronnie's Boudin and Cracklins on Florida; spiced just right without being egregiously so. John is trying out recipes today for the Internationals next month in Memphis. He and I both will readily tell you about the time he got fifth in the World on chicken wings. The World.

I put my own book up there because I'll be synopsizing and reading it as A Thing Itself rather than a sum of its parts this afternoon so I can reassemble the parts and make it into A Better Thing. Plus, I wanted to see how it looks as a book link and to make sure the largely empty website I've reserved for it is still running.  All the while I've been on a White Stripes kick, though this song won the day when it came up on John's poolside BBQ Mastermix.


Weird as Icky Thump is, Jack and Meg could've done a cover of "Undercover Angel" with them acting out all the parts from Charlie's Angels and it would've fit right in. Jack White is all Farrah, but Meg would make a fetching Sabrina, who always was my favorite anyway.

absterge the podex

Samuel Beckett, Molloy
The Spencer Davis Group, Time Seller
David Bowie, Live Santa Monica '72
White Stripes, White Blood Cells

1. Hey, I finished Molloy and reviewed it (3 out of 5 stars) over at the Goodreads:
   
   

   Molloy is funny in the flattest possible way. Bike tire flat. Like, "the idea of a joke is itself a joke" sort of funny with which you can curl up for a long night of starring at the darkened wall of your empty soul. A little like a pratfall except you get to watch the damage of the fall slowly spread until the faller is eventually permanently incapacitated. Hilarious! Read more!

2. This David Bowie live album from '72 is the nazz. The nazz, y'all.
3. I started to talk about a bunch of things I haven't written and then erased that and reformatted this post as a numbered list, and then added this back. Exactly why, while agreeing that Tao Lin's online mask is cloying and a little aggravating, I think Tao Lin is onto something.
4. One of the best parts of Molloy was this numbered list toward the end, partially repeated below:
   
   1. What value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam's rib, but from a tumour in the fat of his leg (arse?)?
   2. Did the serpent crawl or, as Comestor affirms, walk upright?
   3. Did Mary conceive through the ear, as Augustine and Adobard assert?
   4. How much longer are we to hang about waiting for the antechrist?
   5. Does it really matter which hand is employed to absterge the podex?
5. I mean, antechrist? Absterge the podex? Sweet Mary's ear? This book's the gift that keeps on giving!

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