the scene at the wrong place

Here is the scene at the wrong place mentioned in the Little Big Store article.

Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable
Buzzcocks, A Different Kind of Tension
The Undertones, The Undertones
The Adverts, Cast of Thousands
The Clash, Give 'Em Enough Rope

Media: The May 2001 of Country Roads has hit the stands with my trip through the hidden world of Baton Rouge's Italian delis. OK there are only three of them, but they are still relatively hidden and each in their own way, awesome places to eat.  Also, I get lost in the hills of central Mississippi to find the greatest record store in the world, the Little Big Store in tiny Raymond, MS. It was a little sobering to finish up this piece just as the Compact Disc Store, the last great independent, full-spectrum record store in the city, was closing up shop for good just in time for Record Store Day. Sometimes it's just how we do things here; put out fires with wet blankets.

Time ran out on me to get a Record Crate out for 225 this week. There are festivals everywhere through, so this guide from the April issue should point you toward what to do. Really, just drive in pretty much any direction and you will be confronted with massive festivity.

One thing Treme gets right is the difference between bar life here and elsewhere. The chef-in-exile sits alone in a bar in NYC, the ex-pat jazz-musician gets pulled into a jockeying race for justification with other jazz musicians at some posh uptown locale, meanwhile back in New Orleans it is a congenial, familial ruckus, everywhere you go. It is something that features heavily in my book;  in south Louisiana, our public sphere overlaps that of the private, forming a 3-D Venn diagram that resembles an hourglass or giant butt cheeks, depending on the angle. It can be infuriating for outsiders/newcomers that don't want to be touchy-feely about every mundane transaction, that can't handle the endlessly participatory give-and-take life requires here, but then the heat, mosquitoes and bad schools eventually run those people off anyway.

Last night I dog-eared a page of The Unnameable that I thought deftly illustrated this, but this morning it seems the sheer consumptive density of the text evidently un-bent my page, resisted any extraction of its swampy whole to make a point, perhaps because not only is there no point, but there is now whole from which a point can be made. It's a fun summer read! James Franco should make the movie in his spare time between graduate programs.


Also from the Little Big Store. So psychedelic that modern means can't bring it into focus.


Buzzcocks, "Are Everything." I completely forgot about this song. And how much I love it. And everything! And I've never heard "What Do You Know" with the horns! Love the Buzzcocks!

The guitar

Earl "16" Daley, Wake Up 
Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two ("filthy" version, streaming, a zillion times)
Steel Pulse, Handsworth Revolution
Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues


Steel Pulse, "Prediction." The guitar on this!

Note to self: Linda Ronstadt.

Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams
Quintron, Sacre Du Sauvage
David Bowie, Low
Junip, Fields
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage
Oneida, Rated O
Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What
Rickie Lee Jones, The Duchess of Coolsville
Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

Media: Deep inside the wealth of information that is the OffBeat JazzFest Bible issue lies my little profile of Swedish folktronicists Junip, appearing May 12 once the JazzFest dust settles at the Republic. Inside said Bible is editor Alex Rawls' review of the new Quintron, calling it his Low which both sound like good synthetic polymers with which to gird oneself against the spring rain and having to work until 9pm tonight, just as soon as I get Linda Ronstadt out of the way.

Some dream from nights ago led to me singing what little I know of "Chuck E's in Love" on the walk home from the bus; I had it in my head that it was a Linda Ronstadt song instead of the obvious Rickie Lee Jones that it is. Maybe it was Linda Ronstadt singing it in the dream. Or maybe in the dream, I put on that one Linda Ronstadt album, the one with her in the tube socks and the satin jacket and "Chuck E's in Love" was playing.Whatever; it sounds like a stupid dream and I'm glad I can't remember it. I just know yesterday afternoon, repeating the chorus of "Chuck E's in Love" under my breath as I walked passed the Radio Shack and the check cashing place where you cannot wear a hoodie or sunglasses inside I thought Note to self: Linda Ronstadt.


Poor old Poly Styrene. Oh, Cancer! Up Yours!

I finished American Salvage. Swoon with me over at the Goodreads:

Bonnie Jo Campbell is an expert in wounds: how the way we get them is fuzzy and only reveals itself to us over time, in less time than it is revealed to others. How wounds that are not cared for heal wrong. How there is never any money to get wounds looked at anyway, and whose wounds ever heal right? More...

Students for an Excel night class and the cultured words of The Unnameable await, right there with everything else. Hello, everything. Here is what we are going to cover in the next three hours...

hot throbbing

Shaky walkway around the side of the Pat Davis Lounge being further shaken by Keith Frank and his band.

Treme, Season Two
Big Sam's Funky Nation, Take Me Back
The Ex, Dizzy Spells
Terry Edwards, Terryedwards
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage
Geraint Watkins, In a Bad Mood
Jesse Lége & Joel Savoy & Cajun Country Revival, The Right Combination
Paul Simon, So Beautiful, So What

If he could find the phone number, he could shave and put some of that oil on his hair to make it lie flat, and he'd drive to her house.
    "Oh, God," moaned one of the women upstairs. As Jim listened, he let his forearm fall across his leg, and the pain of the burn erupted anew. How had he been so stupid as to move his body that way?
    "Oh, oh, oh oh, oh!" one of the women gasped. And the voice broke free: "Sweet Jesus, yes! Oh, yes! Yes!"
    "Shut up!" Jim screamed into the heating duct. "Stop doing that!" His heart raced, and he stood too quickly, and the bandage pulled, and then he banged the leg against the arm of the couch and collapsed. He sat there feeling his whole existence reduced to hot throbbing.
- from Bonnie Jo Campbell's "The Hurt."  

calling the meek and the humble

• Friday: I had one of the nicest New Orleans afternoons in recent memory, perfect weather in this single sliver of the year that the city does not make its own humid gravy, dicking around Domino Sound Shack, the kind of perfectly curated record store that made me thankful I don't have a turntable because one needs everything in the store. I considered how I could acquire an old Jukebox and fill it indiscriminately with $3 Jamaican 45's and with a push of any three random numbers could be instantly happy for all of my days.
• All those records! I looked into becoming a vintage gospel blues enthusiast with Nuclear Blast. by Reverend Douglas Bell & the Stage Cruisers when in trod a New Orleans Extra: baby in a sling, little hat, no shoes, loudly establishing his New Orleanianity. I thought, In here? It there a casting agent for Treme embedded among the record spinners? Surely you don't have to do that in here. You are among your tribe; lower your spear. But a true warrior never does and he kept up his power-familiarity through the rest of my time in vinyl bliss. Sometimes the grand theatre that is New Orleans is upstaged by some dude's one man show, and sometimes it's just a revue of those shows.

But... Look! I need this!

• My next destination was a friend and colleague's book signing at a wine shop and I parked 1/2 a mile away just to do it. I felt a little horrible for hating the horrible guy and then for stopping at CC's on Esplanade instead of someplace cooler and then for sitting outside and checking email in their wi-fi and then pulling down Nuclear Blast from Rhapsody (but really, what would I have done with the record but have it?) and etc. and etc. This is a common feeling for the Baton Rougean wandering the City of Clowns, one that must be overcome.
• Friend and colleague is Ian McNulty whose Louisiana Rambles is out and has nearly the same map as does my book. His book looks great; you should get it! You get a beer koozie if you get it from him. The wine shop was charming as hell and three tastings in of Central California's Bounty, I was eyeing a mouth-water fresh boule and brie setup a couple seemed to be hoarding and mid-reach-for-it realized that this was something they'd ordered and was not free wine-tasting snacks. My gross humiliation abated when they gave me a piece anyway and that's why I love New Orleans.
• On the walk back, the honeysuckle was like a wet kiss. I motored topdown to the Howlin' Wolf to meet up with my friends with Nuclear Blast blasting away and then ambled with New Orleans' gentle urbanity whizzing by to Cochon Butcher for dinner before the friend's band's show. There was a stop at McKeown's Bookstore, outside which the top photo was taken. "The Gambino" from Butcher sits below.

• The Help is the band, containing former members of New Orleans' the Cold, mid-80's new wave outfit in which Vance "Ellen's brother/former Daily Show correspondent" Degeneres played, and they were good, rather straight for New Orleans' circus music scene actually but the weirdness was brung by this standup/performance routine that introduced them. I offer it without comment because I don't know what to say, except that in the video it looks a little like she wasn't wearing a shirt but she was.

• Riding home in the familiar dark with the Upsetters' Blackboard Jungle Dub, the perfect musical embodiment of bodies moving through them empty vastnesses of space. William Gibson liked to cast as interstellar cargo pilots Rastafarians acloud in dub and weed smoke. They were the only ones who could handle the long drive to Alpha Centauri to drop off mining supplies. I saw a single for this song at Domino (I think it was this one) and wished I'd bought it anyway as a talisman. Something through whose round hole I could peer to see the universe.

Lee "Scratch" Perry & the Upsetters, "Blackboard Jungle Dub (Version 1)"

• It came on just as Good Friday ended and it was one and calling the meek and the humble is what that guy on that hill did and you don't have to believe in anything to believe in doing that.

• Saturday: Roller derby Easter Egg party! Face painting while the Fall plays on an iPod in the bckgrnd! Hula hoops! Tattoos! I got a back massage! and a hamburger! In my neighborhood! All anyone ever wants!
• The second wind caught my sails and Clarke and I headed off to catch High Performance at La Poussiere. The humble Breaux Bridge dancehall was about the third of these places I covered in this second career of covering these places and it's humbleness and sweetness was intact. High Performance recreates with shocking clarity the dissolving of traditional Cajun music in the 50's into crack country dance bands where the accordion swims alongside pedal steel and it is the most beautiful thing in the world. It is culture's mutation trapped in amber, thawed out (or whatever you do with amber; Jurassic Park was on when I left so I should know) and presented in a place that itself is trapped in amber.

Keith Frank at the Pat Davis Lounge in Cecilia, LA; the monogram lights on his amps.

• Then we ventured deeper into the offroads to the Pat Davis Lounge back in the rice pastures and pecan farms of Cecilia to catch the mighty Keith Frank. This might turn into a covering of one of these places but here is a phone-tapped glimpse gleaned in the extra-dimensional din of zydeco in a barn in the middle of nowhere: One song w highly syncopated woodblock centric started w an almost metallic ground to like they might lean into Kashmir but veered off to funkadelic's swing down sweet chariot let me ride then into a James gang style breakdown "it's alright" . Think Lizzy? What is that? Whats next, Bohemian Rhapsody? you felt like anything could be incorporated into it. Then a surf riff / rocksteady reggae party jam "soul survivor"

• Sunday: Easter

• So yes, call out to the meek and the humble and gather them up to you along with the strong and the boastful and the wise. Bring the clowns and the roller derby girls for security and eye candy - not sure which is better suited for which and who cares. Set the controls on the crockpot to the heart of the sun and herald the Spring and to everyone and everything, I meekly and humbly offer my thanks.

assuming yes

L is for "like"

Randy Newman, Born Again
Don Drummond, Jazz Ska Attack
tUnE-yArDs, w h o k i l l
Panda Bear, Tomboy
Beach Boys, Pet Sounds
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage

I'm not sure I can tell the good Randy Newman albums from the bad; his performing persona annoys me just enough that I can't get in close enough to let the lyrics seep in. I know the big songs and love them when other people do them. That's how I am with Randy Newman. I was listening to Born Again based on the suggestions Rhapsody had after Glass Houses and through little wisps and splinters I caught, thought hmmm... not bad. Maybe I've misjudged him. Then I looked at AllMusic to see what they say and that Born Again, outside of his soundtracks, is the worst in his catalog. I suppose I could go up the ladder and find the real acerbic treasures and I'm glad to know they are there, but eh, I could just listen to some music that I actually like*. It was one of the  points I wanted to raise in the great Steely Dan debate: OK everything is perfect and the players are top-notch and the production is peerless as every major Dan dude will tell you ad nauseum, but do you like it? I'm assuming yes, but why, outside of the quality of its components? It's the synergy of those pieces that I am missing.

Not missing synergy: this poem "BIPEDAL" by my friend Dave "Gorjus" McCarty on the Pretty Fakes group blog.

*except for Tomboy, I think I don't really like it but I keep listening**
** ditto on a grander scale for Pet Sounds.

easily encapsulated into the domain of rock 'n' roll by the narrator

Fried green tomato platter at Chelsea's; notable because it is the first good thing I've ever eaten from there.

Gorillaz, The Fall
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
Tom Tom Club, Tom Tom Club
Billy Joel, Glass Houses


As a personal and now, possibly an external challenge, I'm gonna get through all three of Beckett's novels in "the trilogy." When finished, I will get to sew a little merit badge depicting an old man in the dark onto my uniform. My Goodreads review of Malone Dies, in brief:

MALONE DIES is funnier than MOLLOY in the same sense that being mercilessly beaten with a sock-full of boogers is funnier than being beaten with a sock-full of shit. More...

Tom Tom Club, "Pleasure of Love"/"On the Line Again" from Close to the Bone

I had this tape because 1) in 1987 Talking Heads were as cool as anything was and 2) it was on sale on the Record Bar at the mall and 3) the neon animated video for "Pleasure of Love" was on Night Flight all the time and 4) anything Night Flight endorsed, I endorsed and 5) I brought this tape with me to some after-school student council thing (I was desperate to get a scholarship so I joined everything my last two years of high school) and a cheerleader sneered at me over "On the Line Again", a true "what is this shit?" sneer and I said it was punk, 6) because I misheard the recitation at the end. I thought they said "punk is our salvation" when in fact 7) it is "funk is our salvation" which makes more sense, and anyway 8) there is a salient line from a Billy Joel song about the pointlessness of casting something as funk and/or punk when any song can be easily encapsulated into the domain of rock 'n' roll by the narrator, (notice how not far off he was from being Elvis Costello and, vice versa) I think Mr. Joel brings up some valid points.


Billy Joel, "It's Still Rock 'n' Roll To Me." My friend Mike got to pick three albums from his dad's Columbia House 15-for-a-penny subscription and he picked AC/DC's Back in Black, Queen's The Game and Billy Joel's Glass Houses. In the early 80's, those three albums encompassed pretty much then entire universe.

Yesterday in the course of an online discussion on the subject elsewhere I came across my all-time favorite Night Flight clip:


Heroic Struggles performing on New Wave Theatre. If only I'd had this tape for student council bulletin board decorating sessions. I started this post out emulating Beckett's paragraphed numbered lists to see how that felt on after seeing him do it to wanting to write a book about Night Flight to listening to Billy Joel without a shred of ironic distance (thanks Lance). Oh, where this day is gonna take me!