hey, we all give off light now

Tuesday night over the pool.

The Records, Smashes, Crashes, and Near Misses
Raspberries, Fresh
Love & Rockets, Express and Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven
Roddy Doyle, "The Hens" from the forthcoming McSweeney's 38 via the McSweeney's app
The Red Bulletin, (iPad magazine)
Valencia (iPad magazine)
Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination
Wilco, "I Might" from their website
Crocodiles, Sleep Forever
The Jesus and Mary Chain, Honey's Dead
The Cure, 4:13 Dream

• Reading: Day bleeds into night into day again with this playlist, the light pouring out of each little laceration like in The Illumination. I'm just into it; I like how he demonstrates how easily we would work into our routine something as shocking like hey, we all give off light now. Weird... Roddy Doyle's story in the forthcoming McSweeney's (available on their app) is a hoot. Is he always like that? I've never read him but am pre-immersing myself in Modern Irish for a trip this Christmas and thought he might be the one to turn to.
  
  
• Publishing: And speaking of reading, the Red Bulletin is trash; exquisite, enthralling trash. Essentially an iPad eMagazine aCronym/a giant Red Bull ad. It is also a hoot. It is the shallow-men's-magazine-you-leaf-through-at-the-barber-shop of the future! And it's free, which I mean, it is a giant Red Bull ad, so there is the spiritual cost...
  
  Valencia magazine, a breezy lifestyler for Santa Clarita, CA, uses a similar engine with lower production cost/values uses the same engine I think as the Red Bulletin to rather interesting effect. Local magazines of America, including some I write for, you might want to look into something like this. If you are interested enough to download further, they do some interesting and simple things with rich media and I like how the ads all have a pull-down thingie for social media access. Social media hooks should be accessible but hidden away, like cleaning supplies or extra toilet paper; we all know you have them now - no need to leave them on the counter. I dunno; I'm embroiled in a web design project and right now every time I see a little white bird in a rounded square, I want to yell Pull! and have the site chuck it like skeet into the air so I can blow it to bits with a shotgun. Maybe Guns & Ammo has a cool appAzine with that feature.
  
  
• Writing: In this week's Record Crate for 225, I discuss Joe Adaranga, Gillian Welch, Flatbed Honeymoon and bid sweet ol' Teddy's Juke Joint a happy 33rd birthday!  In this month's Country Roads, I dig into the introduction of  molecular gastronomy and modernist cuisine in Baton Rouge's  culinary playing field and talk about my buddy Richard's great YouTube videos about the early days of swamp pop. Here's one:
  
  
  
• Eating: My wife's beef stroganoff is peerless but when we ate up the noodles and I spooned some onto a piece of oatmeal bread, it rode the shit-on-a-shingle magic carpet all the way up to heaven.
  
  
• Listening: How come y'all never told me about Crocodiles? I mean, a squillion PR people did but they tell me about everything. But from y'all? Nothing. I'm here to tell you: Crocodiles is right on.
  
  
  Crocodiles, "Groove is in the Heart"/"California Girls"
  
  Man, I loved Love & Rockets. One week in 1987 I saw L&R (then my favorite band) with Janes Addiction (then and now my least favorite band) opening at Tipitina's on a Wednesday night and then U2 (then former favorite band but still liked them) in all their Rattle & Hum glory on Thursday, Thanksgiving no less. Still one of the best concert weeks ever.        
  
  Whoever it was that slipped a drum machine (or drums that sounded like them) into the Jesus & Mary Chain's junk supply should be roundly beaten every November with a worn out copy of Psychocandy. Why not just kill the band rather than give the band the tools to kill themselves? But then, that's how drugs kinda work, I guess.

power pop consciousness

Yet-DIY'd detail of Rauschenberg's Poster for Peace. 1970. Poster collage of photos and images. Up now at the LSU Union Gallery.

R.E.M., Collapse Into Now
The dB's, Repercussion
Dwight Twilley, The Luck
exhibit at the LSU Union Gallery
Squeeze, The Complete BBC Sessions

• One of my co-workers is working on his net-casting skills; said when he throws a net it looks like a "sack fulla assholes". If I ever put together a slim volume of edgy, symbolist poetry, I'm taking that for the title.
  
• All about Dwight Twilley today. He's one of those guys that lives at the edge of your power pop consciousness if you have one.  Sure, some of his songs sound a little like Ratt, but then I kinda liked Ratt. I came of age in the mid-80's in an uncool place so things were not so cut 'n' dried. I had a B&W Ratt poster on the wall in my teenage bedroom next to the giant R.E.M. one for Lifes Rich Pageant and the lifesize Iggy Pop from Blah Blah Blah. We kinda took what we could get from the Record Bar at the mall. I'm pretty sure I bought both Screaming Blue Messiahs and Coil's The Anal Staircase EP from the same bargain tape bin on one trip. What I'm saying was, I'd've been all into Dwight Twilley too if someone had just put him in my hands.
  
  
  Dwight Twilley, "Remedies"
  
  
• I always wonder with interactive pieces like Rauschenberg poster up there: does anyone ever takes the artist up on his or her offer to add to a work? I bought a poster from Howard Finster while he was still alive. He recommended I color it in and of course I haven't done that. I've instead let it grow brittle unframed in a closet, ruining a perfectly good piece of art in a manner befitting my own personal aesthetic.
  
• This collaborative piece was also at the LSU Union Gallery. Super obvious, badly lit, but still effective.
  
  
  Brad Jensen, Untitled. 2009. Acrylic paint on wooden door + Marc Fresh, Untitled. 2009. Acrylic paint on wooden door + Jonathan Mayers, Untitled. 2009. Oil paint on wooden door.
  
  Jensen is the local Shepard Fairey with his ICON brand and befezzed Capt. Kangaroo guy. I think I've seen some graffiti by Fresh; I register that big pink face as such, but my favorite part of the whole thing is the black/blue star with the eye in it. It's like the mark of the Ghetto Masons, which might not be too bad of a band name. I'm unfamiliar with Mayers' work but admire how he was willing to de-exquisitize the corpse a little by utilizing a different medium and not sticking so heavily to the script. Those three black lumps against the red at the bottom of his panel make me think of the silhouetted seats in Mystery Science 3000; in fact that penis/plant cropping out of one of them could be a robot. If that's what it is, bravo! MST3K is an excellent reference on the nature of collaboration.
  
• Would John McIvor be offended if his Le Promenade made me think of bubblegum angrily smeared on a picture of flowers; an innocent's quick revenge against tyranny? Would Squeeze be offended if I said the same of their 1977 material on The Complete BBC Sessions? I mean both in the best possible way.
  
  
  John McIvor, Le Promenade. 1960. Oil on canvas.
  
  
  Squeeze, "The Knack"
  
  
  

Sputnik noises

Joe Adranga and Lee Barbier at Haven Gallery, Baton Rouge
Louis Maistros, Anti-Requiem: New Orleans Stories
Brigitte Fontaine, Brigitte Fontaine Est...
Saliva Staib's paintings at the Glassell Gallery
Mood Rings of Saturn at the Hartley Vey Studio, Baton RougeClash of the Titans
Belle & Sebastian, The Life PursuitThe Byrds, Younger Than Yesterday
Flowered Up, "Weekender"
The Charlatans UK, Up to Our Hips
Gillian Welch, The Harrow & the Harvest (twice) and Time: The Revelator

• I forgot about this one. I like the Sputnik noises. In general.
  
  
  The Byrds, "C.T.A.-102"
  
  
• Nobody remembers Flowered Up except my friend Lee who remembers everything. We were talking about 80's bands that had a guy that just danced, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Happy Mondays and the Blue Aeroplanes. It's a trend that should be revived, I think, except do people really "have bands" in the same sense as they did then? Maybe if they had a guy that danced, a band would form around him like a reverse oyster/pearl dynamic.
• I can't bring myself to listen to the whole of the new Bon Iver, especially when there is now a new Gillian Welch record around. Bon Iver clears the air the way one of those expensive Japanese ionizer things does; Gillian Welch does it in the manner of a spring breeze coming across a graveyard.
• Plus, Say you wanna see my blue jeans hangin' on your ol' clothesline on Welch's "That's the Way The Whole Thing Ends." I'm not given to swooning over come-hither lyrics, but that one does it for me.
• I never make it to "Acts of the Apostle II" on The Life Pursuit despite it being maybe my favorite pop record of the last 10 years. 

let's-go-to-the-ice-cream-store-and-then-go-get-hot-dogs

The jalapeño "kolache", technically a klobasnek, from Thee Heavenly Donut.

Tom Franklin, Cooked Letter, Crooked Letter
Owl City, All Things Bright and Beautiful
The Dixie Dregs, Night of the Living Dregs
Yo-Yo Ma,  Appalachian Journey
Can, Saw Delight
Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense

• There are some jarring aggro moments among the brilliantly polished 'n' smoothed corners on the new Owl City record. I addressed Owl City on this as I drove Maya to art camp. I said, "OK, Owl City, I don't know if that's really you with all that shoutin'." and Maya added, "I know! You're more of a let's-go-to-the-ice-cream-store-and-then-go-get-hot-dogs guy, Owl City, not a crazy, 'Helter Skelter' shouty guy." The Force is strong in this one.
  
  
  Owl City, "Kamikaze"
  
  
• I always have it in my head that the Dixie Dregs are Southern Rock par excellante when they instead are more of a Yes, y'all, fusion chamber wonk cabal. There's a part right here that sounds like Bernie Worrell's synth lines for Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense.  And now, a few minutes later, it's all a pissing-match fiddle/guitar hoedown battle for the Kountry Kozmos. Like that Yo-Yo Ma Appalachian record 'cept more co-caine.
• Tom Franklin is so subtly good in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Like at first, I felt this was like Mark Richard or Breece D'J Pancake without the lyrical high-wire (which was the best facet of Franklin's Smonk. I've kinda forgetten some of the plot points but will lug around some of those phrases for years to come.) until I realized it was 1:30 in the morning and I still wanted to keep reading. It's like standing up and finding out your body is drunker than your brain is and weaving around the debate over ordering just one more.
• I have been listening to Can's Saw Delight off-and-on for two decades now and just got the joke in the title.
  
  
  Can, "Don't Say No"
  
  
• It's been a while since I searched for myself on YouTube.
  
  Here I am winning the BBC Young Composers award for my piece "Owl, Hunting"
  
  
  and here I am dancing in the gym.

burnin' 'n' doin'

Boom! Blew yr mind!

Sherlock
Neil Young (& the International Harvesters), A Treasure
The Grateful Dead, Dick's Picks Vol. 26: Electric Theater, Chicago, IL, 4/26/1969 & Labor Temple, Minneapolis, MN, 4/27/1969
The Flaming Lips, Embryonic

• Yes shit, Sherlock! Totally into the new modern day BBC Sherlock Holmes franchise. I like how they are making Tim from The Office basically play Dr. Watson like he's Sting circa 1984. Remember when Sting was so serious? Like you believed he was that dude from that famous book by Nabokov that you hadn't read? Also how did they find a guy with an even more intensely Engerlish a name of Benedict Cumberbatch to play Sherlock Holmes? He's great at it, like a post-sexual awakening Matthew Gray Gubler from Criminal Minds, but still, BBC, you couldn't find a Sir Nigel Teakettle Wellington, third Earl of Gryffindor to plug into the cast?
• Contrary to the likely unfair associations I project onto listening to the Grateful Dead, I am getting a shit-ton of work done with Dick's Picks Vol. 26 patchouli burnin' 'n' doin' that little spin-dance the background. A question to you Deadheads out there: don't you generally just want them to shut up when they start singing? Or does The Thing About Them soar past simple performance for you, and complaining about the singing is like saying you won't take the red one because you don't like how the capsule tastes?
• I didn't like Embryonic the first time around but boxcarred in right after the Dead - isn't that pretty much how life works anyway, a train on which the departed precedes us on the tracks and the yet-born is linked to our rear coupler? - wait! I think I understand string theory now! I'm going to hold onto this moment before it passes...
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• OK, what I was going to say is that I didn't really like Embryonic that much the first time around even though it fits perfectly with the True Band Nature the Flaming Lips has attained at this point, and I like that nature, but not the manifestation of the nature. It's like being really into wolves until one gets in your house. But after the massive Picks of Dick collection, Embryonic is right on time - isn't that pretty much how life... this post is becoming a link to itself.

The Flaming Lips, "The Ego's Last Stand"

We should all hope for such a future

Super 8
Radiohead, Amnesiac
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
John Digweed, Structures Two
Faust, From the Frozen South
Sapat, Mortise and Tenon
Monoshock, Walk to the Fire
Acid Mothers Temple, Mantra of Love
Sunn O))), Black One

• Super 8 is great! I hate movies and I love this one, so I don't know what that says exactly. You see it all coming, it is a shameless reshuffle of past Spielberg themes and tricks, down to floating bicycles. It is emotionally manipulative, laden with jaw-dropping effects - like I looked over at Maya during one stretch and her jaw was actually dropped. Total triumph of movie-going.
• I feel the kinda the same about Cloud Atlas. See my Goodreads review. 
• I missed my deadline for the Record Crate this week so, Baton Rouge: go see Rodney Crowell at the Red Dragon on Saturday, and maybe the singer-songwriter gods will time it so you can go see James McMurtry at the Spanish Moon later that evening.
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  Here is McMurtry's "Choctaw Bingo", the greatest song ever written.
• The photo at the top of this post is of a photo on the wall of Jay's Bar-B-Q. We should all hope for such a future. And I would normally tell you to get the pork po-boy but I had a bite of the club sandwich and, dude. Club sandwich.

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.