Video Game Design Camp: I'm making teenagers make their own video games, which is like urging narcissists to ground their own mirrors. Some are bogging down in the details, others are attempting to be disruptive, a couple aren't sure if they know what they are doing. The full spectrum of teenaged life. Teaching them this is like saying, here is how your native language, that I don't really understand myself, works. Just as well, their insults are terrible.
I've never read Thomas McGuane before Driving on the Rim. I've read that his early ones, particularly Ninety Degrees in the Shade, are lacerations of America the way folks did it back in the 70's, and that his mid-career ones like Nothing But Blue Skies are lovelier, rhapsodic looks at Bein' Out West. He's also written a nonfiction book names Some Horses which sounds so corny it might just work. I've never read any of those, and I'm starting to feel like I may never finish this one, a book in possession of all these traits. It's one of those books where I'm loving every minute I read it, just not every day that it's taking me.
I feel that same way about every Oneida album I've heard, and will probably feel that way about this new one on the bus ride home. Mazes by Moon Duo is my favorite album of 2011. There is almost nothing there except for a glowing, perfect, ember of the campfire of rock and roll. It is like one quick snakebite: succinct.
My afternoon at Beauvoir Park, a private park owned by my friend Les, fundraising for WHYR. Sure, the photos are a little over-saturated but so perhaps was the photographer. I love how the under-the-overpass is aquarium-colored.
The hobo village under the overpass.
Polly Pry on the deck of the weird house-made-of-windows.
A peek into the bar.
The Front Brusly Swampers. For those not around here, Brusly (pronounced broo-ly) is a rural community across the river, traditionally split into Front Brusly facing the river and Back Brusly behind it.
Maya's record player came in. Playing records at the wrong speed is like commanding time, bending the three dimension by the bungee cord of the fourth + it's endlessly hilarious. The second Vintage Vinyl opened we turned $20 of her birthday money (Remember when you got birthday money? Me either.) into Hey Jude and any second now the UPS guy is gonna bring a vinyl copy of Abbey Road to our door. I'm picturing him sauntering up the yard like the boys do on the cover except suddenly finding himself caught in the spider web string between the camellia trees. Again. It is also endlessly hilarious.
You know what is also endlessly hilarious? When Maya and her friend do their impression of the growled smiles await you when you rise part of "Golden Slumbers". They have it down pat, as they should since they've done it straight for a week now, erupting in a cascade of giggles every time. They can't wait to get a hold of the album so they can do the smiles await you when you rise part AT THE WRONG SPEED! Imagine...
I wonder if some quantum event happens when something is endlessly hilarious, when a joke never gets old. Does time stop, or do your three physical dimensions stretch in a commiserate rate with time, kinda like how when two cars are moving at the same speed in the highway, they look like they're standing still? Except if they have spinners on the rims. Then I don't know what dimension that happens in.
I don't know what's up with me and the fourth dimension lately. It's like I got high for the first time and just thought it all out, man.
We went swimming and then to the lonely old Toys-R-Us for bike lights. I understand that most of the Toys-R-Us's in America are shuttered and ours feels like it is going to shut down while you are in the store, like the lights will snap off and the bored cashiers will just walk away and you and the six other people in the store will have to figure out how to get the formerly automatic doors to open. It will be a good practice for when the actual Rapture happens.
Anyway, it's been a while since we lingered in Toys-R-Us. We usually are grabbing something on the way to a birthday party or draining a gift card with something already worked out in advance. They got some weird stuff in there now, like the following:
This tableau re-enacting the gangsta rap/indie rock team-ups of the early 90's? The early struggles with gentrifying the forest to establish Smurf Village? I'm at a loss.
Arbeit macht Smurf.
At least Iggy Pop is not immediately racist, but who in Toys-R-Us wants this? Was Iggy a wrestler for a minute like Mickey Rourke was? They got a bunch of Iggies contorting away next to some forgotten WWE figurines. The record store should be selling these.
Then my wife made some killer chicken soup and we set our little bikes lights to blinking and cut across the golf course even though we're not supposed to and fuck 'em. We'll just bend time around the golf course fuzz if they show up or sic Hitler Smurf and Iggy on them.
Her record player also does 78s, so soon as I have the kind of evening a grown fella devotes to such nerdery, I'm going to make those YouTube videos I love, the ones of just a record spinning playing into the video camera's mic, of those old 78s that belonged to my step-grandmother. I played a couple yesterday afternoon and they sound great. The dusty static is the fourth dimensional connectors crackling suddenly to life, smiling as they rise.
iPad + wireless keyboard makes everything all better.
If they could just get normal websites worked out it would be even betterer.
Though now I'm wondering if I can switch between applications.
Typed out using the keyboard with my phone, emailed to myself and then plugged in here with that same keyboard:
Ok now this is cool that I can do this in my iphone notes. I really could have typed my book on my phone though it would have looked a little ridiculous, though I suppose the future always looks a little ridiculous from the present. Look at those flashy jumpsuits with lightning bolts and and blinking lights and antennae and shit. Stupid, right? Not when you are on a space walk. Not when you are being bombarded by torrents of radioactive particles. Not when you are a talking money (Edited to add: Ha!) monkey, hubristically augmented so that you can linger at the rim of The Singularity. What hilarious things that monkey is doing, God will notice in His Grand Periphery until He squints and sees His image in that little fishbowl helmet with the blinking lights and the antennae. Then it won't seem that ridiculous. Then Everyone will be All, What have I/they/We done?
Using things the way you are supposed to use things is easy. Using them in any other way involves being an expert circus juggler, which looks cool, or being a bumbler who has to learn to juggle right there in front of everybody, which is less cool.
I had my 2nd favorite lunch at the Piccadilly - étouffée, only surpassed by the shrimp, okra and tomato stew they do - with my all-time favorite lady, all on the upgrade because Henry Gray (he played in Howlin Wolf's band back when they invented popular music) on the cafeteria's old rickety piano. I did a story on it for Country Roads years ago but it seems to be lost to the ether. When they say things put on the Internet are the forever, they're totally wrong about that. I noticed that now when I instinctually take pictures of my food, it feels exactly like saying grace - autonomic, awkward, thankful. Like protocol.
The new CD from our downstreet neighbors Flatbed Honeymoon was waiting in the mailbox when we popped in at the house to let out the dog for a second and I'm gonna listen to it right now. I heard "Our House" by Madness at the pool the other day and I've been thinking about the other "Our House", the "our house is a very, very, very fine house" one ever since, because I think that about my own house.
An installation piece by Haejung Lee at Baton Rouge Gallery. The tiles are little bags of colored rice.
Now I'm wondering since I've never listened to the CSNY one all that close if it's not a cynical song. I looked, and supposedly Graham Nash wrote it about a scene at his house with Joni Mitchell, after she bought a vase and put flowers in it and made a fire, etc. And that it was a renouncement of the free-lovin' Laurel Canyon swinger scene in favor of the quiet domesticity, now that he's all woven into Joni's fabric. Maybe. I can see it just as easily as bitter Prufrockian irony spat against the frost of the window. I can see why you'd fall deep into Joni Mitchell's well but I can also see where she'd be a giant pain in the ass, even to a guy whose job it was to keep David Crosby and Neil Young's egos in check. Did you know Grahan Nash helped invent digital art prints? Me either.
Another by Lee.
I dared a fellow gallery goer to race me up these steps but she didn't take me up on it. I knew not to ask the drunk one because she would have. I rode my bike over to the opening and it was fun to ride back in the cicada breeze and underlit streets of the neighborhoods between our house and the gallery. I need a light and a milk crate on my bike and probably a million over things too if I thought about it, so I'm not gonna. I'm gonna think about how fine my house is and how fine everyone in it is and listen to this fine CD from the neighbors and pass a side-eye at the clock until it's time for drum practice and the pool and a beer and the bikes and the cicadas and everything and the night.
Media:"Belt-Sander Voiced and Still Slingin' the Bologna", about folk-singer Malcolm Holcombe, in this month's 225 Magazine. I don't have say-so in the headlines for pieces once their turned in and sometimes it's an issue, but I wholly approve this time. Also for 225: Yvette Landry's honky tonkin country, My Morning Jacket's Circuital, and WHYR's Radiopalooza in the Record Crate.
