I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever listened to "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" on purpose - like where it wasn't just playing somewhere - and wow, it's a long song. Elton John may not always have the qualities to move me, but he has the quantities. I think that's the problem I have with David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon: they got the quantities, too; it's just that by the time they start budging me, I'm ready to move on my own
Someone sent me a message via Facebook asking if I was hip to Glyn Styler. I was not! It might be the first time Facebook has proven to be unexpectedly useful. Timely, in that I was considering writing off the whole platform as a time suck. The first sign of a system having gone sentient is that it maneuvers to save itself.
The Destroyer guy was so more fun when he didn't really have his shit together. There is probably a Law of Thermodynamics that governs this phenomenon. The bell tower through my open window in the background mixes so perfectly with "Whistlin' Dixie (She Shoots)" it's a little heartbreaking.
The river is high and only getting higher and 2006's Time Bomb High School is my favorite album of 2011 (that version of "Stormy Weather" has everything) and I don't know why I don't go Born to Run when I go Bruce because it is howling jingle-bell grace against everything and jeez, why didn't they give Lou Reed a Vegas show in 1974, just let him go all Liza Minelli on "Heroin" (in 2parts) for an hour at the Sands and out on a sharp bend in St. James parish, Our Lady of Prompt Succor's parking lot was bursting at the seams proclaiming "It's Mothers Day" on its press-letter sign and David Johansen was going "Trash! Pick it up!" in my ears when I got to the Wal-Mart to get extra keys made and the gal there was sweeping up with the little gate to the key-making area trying to close, actually picking up the trash, and I'd've felt bad except a week ago the same gal reptile stared me down as she handed over the tire pressure gauge they'd just broken off my tire so yeah, no hard feelings, just give me my keys.
Goat shanks. My buddy John knows what to do with the cheap cuts
Media: in this week's Records Crate for 225, I come off perhaps a touch more crotchety than I intended about Avett Bros and Mumford & Sons at JazzFest but yeah, they don't do it for me, recognizing I am not the for for which their doings are targeted. But whatever, go to the Baton Rouge Blues Fest this weekend. C'mon, I dare you!
Also:
Alex,I am happy to report that our Press Committee approved your project this morning by a unanimous vote. Congrats!Now we just need the final version of the manuscript...
This is a rolling two day soundtrack because the days keep rolling. Rene Hell and the Soft Pink Truth are ruling the heat-monitors that regulate my soul. It makes me want to be in that room depicted in Smog's "Prince Alone in the Studio", the lights dim and dimmer and dimmer still until one gets cleansed solely in the glow of the little meters and gauges and that even in the daytime, I feel like the world can be tempered by a bank of sliders, a plastic box with an array of knobs. I had a notion last night walking home from the bus: what if people had that little YouTube "press play" triangle superimposed over them and that only when you clicked did they do something, say something funny, do something outrageous, take off their clothes, sing a song, the kinds of things people do in embedded Internet videos. They have to be activated or they just stand frozen in their "thumbnail state." I wondered how many people view life this way all the time and find IRL frustrating because there is no pause and no replay. Or that you can't re-upload your own projection to get it just right.
Or just click onto something else when it's too boring. All this is Technosociology Bullshit 1001 stuff, I know. But it's there, and as I just said at the Goodreads
I'm nearly done with John Brandon'sCitrus Countrybut I feel safe in singing its praises, especially its horrific premise so artfully muted to a background murmur that you forget you are thoughtlessly, even happily galumphing alongside a total sociopath. Brandon stirs a pot of savory moral relativism simmering atop the low, sky-blue flame of the gas range of contemporary disaffection (the preferred kitchen setup of most McSweeney's books) and I'ma lick that spoon when he's done.
I dig Brian Kelly's dense screenprints up at the Baton Rouge Gallery now. About half of them have a repeated, reversed "BOLIVAR" meshed into the meshings and I finally asked him what that was about and the answer was, as always, simpler and better than what any amount of postulating will proffer.
You could fit another entire album in the space given to fading in/out on an Explosions in the Sky record.
My friend Frank had a thoughtful post and great photo of the National Cemetery here in town, and his photo made me think of a candle, and then the Gerhard Richter painting Kerzethat graces the cover of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and then how in this allergin-cloud of sun-dappled spring and coming around to the notion that I might actually need to dispel the dream of immortality and finally give in to bifocals, it's all impressions and memorializing and context and daydream. Happy Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with you...) and blessed day of Saint Florian of Lorch, patron of chimney sweeps and firefighters (he saved a town from a fire with single bucket of water (and prayer)) and on the walk to school, I misheard Maya say, "You know how some wizards have stinky feet?" and I was all "What are you talking about?!" while thinking, they probably do, revealing myself once again as a semi-permanent resident of daydream nation and she said "Ugh! You know how some lizards have sticky feet?!" rolling her eyes and then suddenly going "Whoa! I just caught a dragonfly!" because, whoa, she suddenly did!
Poblano pepper stuffed with queso, chorizo and cilantro. It looks like the Sacred Heart and fittingly, represents my own love for all of humanity. And how I like to eat that love.
It seems a touch irrelevant or maybe even irreverent to do a "Here's my weekend!" post given the big news but I don't know I have all that much to say on the big news. Thanks to everyone that works in ways that I don't even really understand to protect our freedom. Even when I don't agree with some of the methods in my limited-scope perspective, I like my freedom being protected. I like that being a goal of the Great Enterprise. It's a privilege to have the relative sanctity of one's freedom be an organizational goal.
I never want to be in the position of cheering on death, nor do I really believe in a boogeyman controlling a whole movement. "Freedom" is complicated business, one largely unaffected by any amount of heads on pikes.
Really, I just hope it comes to light that AQ high command was operating via stolen wifi from that same Abbottabad coffee shop from which the inadvertent blogger was posting.
Media: I got to talk to John Waite for 225. I am midst putting together some semblance of a Louisiana Festival Coverage post, but it's fair to say the Times-Picayune's Alison Fensterstock has pwned us all with her blow-by-blow of Tom Jones at JazzFest.
6:14 p.m.Panties are flying toward the band. The undergarments that don't make it to the stage land on the VIP ticket holders down front.
1) Chicken fricassee, sautéed spinach and fried plantains from the Bennachin booth at JazzFest. Hat tip to Blackened Out for that suggestion; 2) The requisite JazzFest mango freeze to lower one's core temperature; 3) City Park right off where I parked. I ate up this scene in the metaphoric sense; 4) Morningstar Farm Chik-N sammich elevated by farmer's market fare; 5) Peach and cream snoball at FestForAll; 6) Amazing caramelized bacon at my friend John's place. With this I turned the corner on the whole make-dessert-out-of-bacon thing; 7) More meat and bacon and sacred hearts like the one at the top; 7) Bacon in the pre-carmelization phase with John's BBQ team banner in the background. Suspicious Rinds are going to be competing at Memphis in May next week, provided the Mississippi doesn't supercrest and destroy us all.
