Goo Vader

Happy Father's Day from Goo Vader. Maya made goo at Harry Potter Camp and dug out the Star Wars pancake molds from a birthday long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. I don't think she had any conscious context going here, but surely this isn't the first projection of Darth Vader imagery onto Father's Day.


Yesterday we waited for an hour to sunburn the holy hell out of ourselves at the new water park. They have a "lazy river" running through it, though a fella can pick up a fair speed on an out-of-control innertube and end up accidentally sticking ones feet on countless teenagers and moms conned into taking a bunch of kids to the water park. One Larry David moment after another. Once you ditch the innertubes and acquiesce to teeming humanity and the suns rage against out tender flesh, it's pretty fun. Killer snack shop. For real, much better than a local parks commission water park could get away with being.


Shit got real at the Quidditch match during the TWO AND ONE HALH HOUR closing ceremonies of Harry Potter Camp. I was afraid Stonedragon was gonna go all Vancouver on us if they'd lost. This was their seventh and last year - I guess it was one per book (tidy!) - and there were plays and wizard dueling battles and lots of heartfelt speeches. Harry Potter Camp is sweet as hell. I suppose I felt as strongly about Star Wars as kids feel about Harry Potter + there is a Nerd Power aspect to it that Star Wars eschews for tried-and-true Disney princess business, so cool. Two and a half hours, though.


Goo Yoda. Friday afternoon at the office I had to explain to someone who the Yardbirds were.

The Yardbirds, Five Live
The Who, Live at Leeds
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Unknown Mortal Orchestra
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Finding Bigfoot

We are, as a family, all about Finding Bigfoot on Animal Panet. Pulling for Bobo, Rusty and Ranae to get their squatch. Cloud Atlas is a dizzying pyramid of a novel withe a giant Illuminati/Sauron eyeball watching as you reach each summit and stare unbelieving at the climb to the next. Fatherhood is a little like all that.

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.