talk "epiphany"

Nico Muhly, Seeing is Believing streaming at NPR
James Joyce, Ulysses

French soldier picking flowers during the Phoney War.

• I started reading the free Project Gutenberg Ulysses today because it is Bloomsday, just like when I started it last year. And next year. I liked it better this year, if that counts for anything.
• The best thing I read today, though, was about the Phoney War, a six-month period at the beginning of WWII where war was declared but fighting had yet to commence. The Germans called it der Sitzkreig. Oh, war puns.
• I ate an insane gourmet foie gras "PB&J" for dinner as part of a story and ate a real PB&J for lunch. They both cast their own epiphanies.
• An unrelated epiphany is that sometimes I hate writing, and then I do it and then I don't hate it as and then I write some more and hate it even less and sometimes I get to where I love it, and sometimes it's a zero-sum game.
• We are supposed to talk "epiphany" when we talk Ulysses, right? Is that what it's about? Truth be told, I am more into the deep gibberish of Finnegans Wake and the perfect language of "The Dead" - I have a crow to pluck with you. That's a line that runs riverrun around everything else.

LONDON IS DEAD! LONDON IS DEAD! LONDON IS DEAD!

This person was right by me! I wonder if they remember the skinny kid pressed against the rail separating the floor from the seats - he had FRANKLY in marker on his shirtless, skinny chest, MR. SHANKLY on his back. We gave him a tattered gladiola tossed our way from the stage.

Gillian Welch, Time (The Revelator)
Kim Richey, Glimmer
Emmylou Harris, Pieces of the Sky
Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker
Morrissey, Bona Drag and Your Arsenal

Wow, it's been a while since I've listened to Pieces of the Sky. Emmylou Harris wears "For No One" like a stolen raincoat in a downpour.

Media: The vinyl-obsessed, Fucked Up, And Heartless Bastards in this week's Record Crate blog for 225.

Transcribing. Evidently, I start every interview with "uh... OK!" like I just woke up to suddenly register my subject on the other end of the conversation.


We all need to be reminded of how good "To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)" is.

I nearly deafened myself listening to tinny-ass Your Arsenal twice in a row, tinnier-assed by some knock-off earbuds on the downward slide, but so glorious. Mouthed every word in the bus. I saw Morrissey on this tour in the ruins of the State Palace Theatre and he was gladiola-smashing, Fat Elvis, rock ogre mesmerizing. It was all I could do to not tweet every line of "Glamourous Glue" in all-caps, @JennyHolzer style. WHERE IS THE MAN YOU RESPECT? AND WHERE IS THE WOMAN YOU LOVE? and LONDON IS DEAD! LONDON IS DEAD! LONDON IS DEAD!

amanuensis

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Shape Shift HD
How I Met Your Mother
Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
The Byrds, Greatest Hits
Owl City, All Things Bright and Beautiful
Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney II
Morton Feldman, Neither
Charlemagne Palestine, Voxorgachitectronumputer

Cloud Atlas mentions the word amanuensis: certain persons performing a function by hand, either writing down the words of another or performing manual labour.


I've never watched Mother before some marathon running in the background last night while I finished up some articles and sure, I'm off the wavelength of the contemporary sitcom, instead tuned into bad reality TV and barely following HBO history/drama - I can better delineate the nuances among the clans of Real Housewives than I can the seven Kingdoms of Game of Thrones, though who isn't thrilled that Peter Dinklage gets a great role that is more about his voice than his height, and shit, when are the ladies all just going to be thankful to Luann for taking them to Morrocco - but, man, Mother is awful. Willow, Doogie, Andropolis - how can you do this? to us? to yourselves? You all once had a sense of how to do TV. Makes me glad I've never watched an episode of Three and a Half Men so Ducky can remain Ducky in my mind.

Trying to channel Maya's river of love for the Beatles into suitable tributaries is like waving those little orange directional cones at an approaching glacier. Go Left! No! Left!. Pointless. Whatever, the Byrds are so lovely and they came up in one of her Beatles books, so here it is.


"5D" is so good and it gets better when it gets cooking.

Has Los Lobos ever done a version of "So You Wanna Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?" If not, may this utterance conjure it.

While getting my hair cut, the biker lady that does it and I were talking about cancer because that's what it's come too, talking about cancer at the beauty parlor, and the biker lady said, "It's a shame when the self no longer recognizes the self." Chew on that while you conduct the passage of ice floes and dream about being rock stars.


Morton Feldman's Neither, with text by Samuel Beckett

I never

The Rolling Stones, Some Girls
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Shape Shift HD
The Rolling Stones, Out of Our Heads 
The Butterfield Blues Band, East-West
Junior Wells, It's My Life, Baby
James Young, Chicago Blues

I never made the connection that the Velvet Underground's "There She Goes Again" is really the Rolling Stones' "Hitch Hike" which really is a Marvin Gaye song.

5 images and quotes about Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre

• 
  Carl Andre, Lever, 1966, firebricks. Image from the National Gallery of Canada's website.
  
  

  "All I am doing," says Andre, "is putting Brancusi's Endless Column on the ground instead of in the sky. Most sculpture is priapic with the male organ in the air. In my work, Priapus is down on the floor. The engaged position is to run along the earth." Rhetoric aside, he denies emphatically that his work has even implicit sexual meaning. But as originally planned, Lever was not without sexual connotations, coursing through the doorway like a 34 1/2 foot erection. (Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology.)

• 
  Ana Mendieta, 1972, from here.

  Carl Andre broke up with Ana Mendieta in a fury when she refused to turn down the Prix de Rome in sculpture and its yearlong residency in 1983. They got back together when he came to visit her in Italy. When she “went out the window” in 1985, Carl Andre showed the police officer who came to the apartment a catalogue of his work. He said to the officer, “Maybe I was wrong. She wanted to go to bed. I wanted to watch TV… I don’t know, maybe I should have gone to bed with her, if that’s what she wanted. In that sense, maybe I did kill her.” No one had asked if he killed her. He said, “You see, I am a very successful artist and she wasn’t. Maybe that got to her, and in that case, maybe I did kill her.” (Elizabeth Bachner, "June Again" from Bookslut.)

• 
  Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Body Tracks), 1974, Lifetime color photograph, 10 x 8 inches (25.4 x 20.3 cm);.Copyright of The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York, NY. Image from here.
  

  It was through the gallery that Mendieta first came to know Carl Andre, when he served on a panel entitled, "How has women's art practices affected male artist social attitudes?" According to Griefen, many associated with the gallery at the time believed that as her relationship with Andre developed, her relationship with the gallery suffered, a feeling that culminated with her resignation in 1982. (Gillian Sneed, "The Case of Ana Mendieta" from Art in America.)

• 
  Carl Andre sculpture, image from here.
  

  She exposed awful truths about the art world in her work and after her life was cut short. She challenged racial and gender contexts by using the most simple materials possible — the ones that the earth provided and her own body. Dirt, mud, leaves — they were all part of how she identified her physical form — her skin, her body, and her self. (Coco, "Badass Ladies of History - Ana Mendieta" from Persephone Magazine.)

• 
  Ana Mendieta, image from here.

  (As he never applied color, he never had to renounce it.)
  
  (Battcock.)

you may be right

Call of Atlantis HD
Thomas McGuane, Driving on the Rim
Jimmy Buffett, CMT Presents Jimmy Buffett & Friends: Live from the Gulf Coast

I heard that in years past, pigs were drawn into the slaughterhouses of the Chicago stockyards by hooks attached to their noses. A pig is a smart animal, but this placed the decision elsewhere. It was in this spirit I headed once more to White Sulfur Springs to pay a call on Jocelyn Boyce. (Ch. 14)

also

Napoleon said that if it weren't for religion the poor would kill the rich. (Ch. 15)

The library's Overdrive system up and deleted Driving on the Rim right out from under me upon the due date, or rather, made me delete it, as if it was teaching me a lesson. I had 4 more chapters to go but I'm OK with letting go at this late point. I felt the protagonist, approaching a trial for an event I kinda don't remember from the beginning of the book, should have likewise let it go and just enjoyed the sweet funny moments as they happened until they didn't happen anymore. Similarly, I loved almost every sentence of the book while feeling ambivalent about the coalescence. I'm thinking that's the theme.

Thomas McGuane, as it turns out, is Jimmy Buffett's brother-in-law. I believe James Claffey, who turned me onto this book to begin with, told me that fact and I'd forgotten it. James has his own new stuff up at The Nervous Breakdown that you should read. James was powerful figure in the little flower patches of a lit scene in Baton Rouge and has wisely upon graduation battened up for a life on an avocado farm in California. You'd be stupid if you didn't. James has a great Irish foghorn of a voice and you should read his words in one.

Anyway, it was Jimmy Buffett Nite at the pool tonight which consisted of a grill full a Cheeseburgers in Paradise and an interminable live concert CD, one that spares nary a second of stage banter, played through twice. I killed off a chapter of Driving on my phone as Jimmy trotted old Jesse Winchester and Allen Toussaint out for a second round.

I ran into friends at a performance of a contemporary folksinger type named Madeline at Vintage Vinyl, meeting up just at the Billy Joel section of the racks, and she of the friends said the best thing about getting older was how the field of what was acceptable in music was so wider now, and took some easy coaxing from me to buy a cheap copy of Glass Houses. You may be right; it's nice to be able to kinda love that dinosaur with impunity but also I'm not sure I'll find a moment on the timeline when I'll be all, "Jimmy Buffett's all right, ya know?" Maya called it "creepy old-person music" and I hope as I get creepier and older, my tastes grow so as well. It might be the pool fatigue talking, I may be crazy, but I kinda wanna write a 33 1/3 book about Glass Houses now. I've had worse ideas.

one quick snakebite

I cropped out the reason the dog was allowed to be so cavalier with the snake.

Moon Duo, Mazes
My Morning Jacket, Circuital
Thomas McGuane, Driving on the Rim
Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
Oneida, Absolute II

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.