all I have

Louis C.K., Ice Cream

Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
Breaking Bad
Braniac, Electro Shock for President
Au Ras Au Ras, Au Ras Au Ras
Black Moth Super Rainbow, The Autumn Kaleidoscope Got Changed
Charlemagne Palestine & Simone Forti, Illuminations
Zoltan Jeney, OM (these last two courtesy of the cornucopia of ROOT BLOG)

•  I had
•  some things I wanted to say
•  but
•  now all I have is:
• OM is the most willfully irritating minimalist music I've ever heard, and it pretty much wiped my slate clean.

Bastille Day

Barnett Newman, Be I. Not my photo; the guards at the Menil Collection are on their game.

• I was walking by the library at lunch, behind one of those college guys that look like they just got here from the awkwardest parts of junior high. There was a totally cute girl walking next to him, flipping her hair, "So, how do you know all this stuff?" I assume they'd just left class. He looked straight ahead and went, "Uh, take notes and pay attention to the lectures?" She giggled, "Oh, OK..." and veered off with him glancing at his phone.
• I finished Let The Great World Spin. It is flawed and wonderful and reviewed in full at the Goodreads. I'm reading Bret Easton Ellis' Imperial Bedrooms and enjoying the relative simplicity of a book with one narrator as shallow as a cocaine mirror after my nth multi-narrative monster in a row.
• I had parallels and parables from my Video Game Design class to add to this, but I'm kinda tired of talking bout them, and plus they are right now figuring things out and even collaborating without my exclusive direction, so I will let them be.
• Somebody on The Twitter suggested that New Orleans start celebrating Bastile Day with at least the same gusto with which they do Cinco de Mayo, the day that Santa Claus comes from the bad restaurant down the street with a sack full of margaritas. I added the part from Santa on.
• Somehow, this post has taken nearly a week to compose. We went to Houston this weekend to museum it up and not be in Baton Rouge for one goddamn minute. The surrealist stuff up at the Menil Collection is a balm to my spirit, though I find I'm less and less charmed by the Rothko Chapel with each visit after a rather significant peak about 20 years ago. The Cy Twombly Museum though glows with a continuously radiating heat untouched by his recent passing. It is The Art with him, and why he's a favorite. Even sweet old Voice in the Menil and the breathtaking grace of that little stick dragging though the illusion of thick wet paint - seriously, I think I double my knowledge about how art works every time I see one of Jasper Johns's pieces in the flesh - is a different animal from those massive Twombly canvases scribbled upon with the Magic Scrawl of Antiquity.
• Here's my dilemma: I just don't care for Barnett Newman, though I recognize there is something in there that, if I can just get to it, will be similarly illuminating. I was trying to groove on Be I, a sizable red square bisected by a thin white line and I thought I got it. I want that line to be thinner, a fissure implied in paint like Johns' smear and it isn't; it's a line. I want the red to be clouds, subconscious, a manifestation of Thinking About Red like all those Rothko's there are about brown and black and sunlight, and it isn't, it is flat-ass red. And then I noticed that the line doesn't go all the way through; there is a little chink in the white right at the top and right at the bottom. I thought about when you are messing about with pixel graphics like my campers were all week, using the fill tool to flood an area with red. If there is some little hole in the line, the fill color rushes through and fills everything and I thought "aha!" it's about holes in the supposed absolute. It's about one part of your life bleeding into the next because no matter how pronounced our seperative concepts are, they are still flimsy. We want to fill students with knowledge, children with determination, weekend getaways with merriment, build boundaries between here and there - we saw two people we knew from Baton Rouge sitting outside our hotel in Houston as we drove off for dinner - and well, it doesn't really work. Everything bleeds all over everything. BUT, I still can't give that to Newman; his red is just red, his line just a line. maybe just not a particularly great line. I'm trying to fill his little areas with the red in my bucket and it flows through like nothing is there. Storm the gates and find the fortress empty.

Edited to add: the discussion continues to unpack itself at le roman-fleuve de la femme folette.

Wonderful.

April Hammock, Relics from an Alien Nation. Graphite.

There is a lot of great stuff on display this month at Baton Rouge Gallery, but I'm rather drawn (ahem) to this stonerific drawing by Ms. Hammock. It reminds me of Conrad (member of ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead) Keely's ball-point drawings, which in turn reminds me of filling high school notebooks with marginalia which is really all I want to do with my life.

Collum McCann, Let The Great World Spin
David Bowie, The Buddha of Suburbia
The Monochrome Set, Westminster Affair
Brian Eno, The BBC Sessions (thanks, ROOT BLOG)
David Bowie, Hunky Dory
Arab Strap, Monday at the Hug and Pint

• Walking into the building this morning, I heard the roar of an airplane overhead and immediately started into "Back in the U.S.S.R." We might be reaching Beatles-saturation at our house. 
• Last night at the pool I started going "Wonderful....Wonderful..." in response to something Maya said, fully convinced she would pick up on it because it was part of whatever song on Abbey Road that leads into "The End" but nope, it's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" off Ziggy Stardust. I thought in vain hope, maybe I can get her to latch onto David Bowie, and then thought about the Awl's tidy force ranking of the Bowie records (I dunno, I'm kinda all about Hunky Dory) and then about how I've never listened to any of those "new" Bowie albums, like really, any after Never Let me Down which came out twenty-three years ago and then, O Lord, twenty-three years ago? Something that is over twenty years old is "new" to me now? Wonderful. So let's hear one of them new ones like The Buddha of Suburbia (eh, not bad, alternately soundtrack (which it is) and catchy hair-salon pop) which is only sixteen years old, which is probably the right age to go through one's Bowie phase. 
• I'm not really given to age anxiety but I kinda don't want to run the numbers and find out Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil came out fifty years ago or something, or that Appetite for Destruction was first released on wax cylinder, available to homesteaders via Sears & Roebuck Co. stagecoach mailorder.
• The Monochrome Set! The smartypants faction of the B-Sides left behind when the rest went on to become Adam & the Ants!
  
  
  The Monochrome Set, "Cast a Long Shadow"
  
  
• Let the Great World Spin is mesmerizing, fabulous in its structure and detail, but is now the third fourth (forgot about Goon Squad) novel-in-stories-with-a-composite-yet-serial-protagonist-narrator-train-deal-going-on in a row I've read and, while it makes me want to write one myself now, I'm ready to read, like, you know, a story or some non-fiction, something that is just about something already. You post-structuralists get off my goddamn lawn! I wave my cane at you!

you and your fellow teen wizards

• I got totally choked up by that damned Grand Rapid, MI "American Pie" video. Thank God they didn't go all Lee Greenwood on me or I'd never recover.
• I've been on it for an hour and already don't really care for Google+. Too clicky, too business-jargony and too much work for something I would use to avoid work to begin with. Google+ seems like something that would have come out of a webinar, or worse: something you fill out before joining an in-progress webinar. That's why I like the Cagean simplicity of Twitter: there is nothing there and I am following it and that is poetry as I need it. In Google+ feel like I am perpetually just updating my customer profile, which is what you are doing anyway on all the other sites, I suppose, but at least it seems fun when I do it there.
• Also, I have yet to see anyone be funny on Google+ and humorlessness is the most sinister horseman of the new media platform Apocalypse.
• The sad ecstasy of the meta-social media-o-sphere reminds me of how computer programming used to be so fun when it was just you and your fellow teen wizards that did it, all hopped up on pizza and 12-sided dice in suburban bedrooms, making your own Zork or whatever (I wrote my own 3-channel synthesizer on the Commodore 64. It used the paddle controllers from the Atari and basically sounded like a Theremin. Burrrrrrrroooooooooooeeeeeeeeeiippppppp! See? Awesomeness!) and when the business people got involved and suddenly there was money to be made, it got ruined. I will keep this in mind while teaching the Video Game Design camp again next week. 
• The first rule of social media is: don't talk about social media. Second rule: don't reference Fight Club. Third rule: be funny. Fourth rule: firemen can always make you cry.

let my heart come apace with cherubs

Slumming with the mermaid at Storyland.

Protestant Music, The Car
Vincent Gallo, When
The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Strung Out in Heaven
Robyn Hitchcock, Jewels for Sophia
Richard Buckner, Since 

• My fastest review turnaround ever on Protestant Music: saw CD-R on counter at coffee shop, immediately walked to office and listened/wrote review while emailing dude I was doing so, sent it in and then now linking back to it online. My coffee was still warm. It was like bending time to my will. Also in this week's Record Crate for 225:  Big Business, Greg Jacobs, WHYR.
  
• An on-the-busy-side day at the office with spates of rage-corralling and goal-assessment + drizzly weather + one more cup of coffee than usual has put me right in a Seattle 1998 - Kansas City 2000 mood and with the exception of the aforementioned Protestant Music, the above was my soundtrack.
  
• Robyn Hitchcock lays it all out in his spilt-jigsaw-in-the-day-room manner.
  
  
  Robyn Hitchcock, "Viva! Sea-Tac"
  
  
•  If I could, I would add in Arab Strap's Elephant Shoe, but it's off the digital radar. Too bad; it is such an exquisite little cyanide capsule of a record.
  
  
  Arab Strap, "Cherubs".
  
  The building I worked in had this huge atrium with a massive bay of windows and a dramatic curving staircase, and I had a little pre-iPod mp3 player so glitchy it would take me most of the afternoon to load Elephant Shoe on it, and then once I did, I'd coat up and descend that staircase and take in the shock of falling snow and let my heart come apace with cherubs and trudge out into the cold for a while, sometimes just walk around the building but once this album took me on a two-hour hike through an ice storm, every little branch was a popsicle stick stuck into a test tube of ice, branches slicing right off the bodies of trees, cars skidding immediately out of their driver's coaxing - I saw one woman take her mittened hands off the wheel and shrug as she slid by. There was a little hippie coffee shop just out of reasonable walking distance and I'd go there and order the only cappuccino they'd make all day and read a book like a pre-forgiven coffee shop asshole and muse the air I breathed until I my own protestant inclinations would bubble up and I'd take on the snow and slump back up the stairs and at my desk be found.
  
  
•  Oh, shit! "Drug Song for Paula!" This was the song! Still is!
  
  
  Arab Strap, "Drug Song For Paula"
  
  

wilder shores of love

Maya in front of a Cy Twombly painting at the Tate Modern.

Meshuggah, Destroy, Erase, Improve

Striborg, Trepidation

Brian Posehn, Fart and Wiener Jokes

Nachtmystium, Addicts: Black Meddle Part II
Wolves in the Throne Room, Two Hunters
Au Ras Au Ras, Au Ras Au Ras

• Metal Monday! Except it's Tuesday!
• Scrawl the clouds red and release the wild birds from the doodling hand of the Creator, for Cy Twombly is dead. 
• Really, Cy Twombly was one of those artists that I hated at first, thought was a total sham and then in the Houston gallery devoted to his work got Instant Understanding, and through that experience, more slowly, an understanding how art works. 
• The key to which is that works is an active verb and you are the thing worked upon.
• Tess Brunet and her Au Ras Au Ras project is not metal, but she's got roots in my hometown of Houma which lends its own metal cred.

Cy Twombly, Wilder Shores of Love, 1985.

America

This is the pin Madeline Albright wore when she met with Kim Jong-Il. The display card at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where Read My Pins: the Madeline Albright Collection is on display, delicately explains:

In no country are pins more crucial and less decorative than in North Korea. Every North Korean is required to wear an image of the country's founder. Absence of this badge of adoration is a sign of independent political thought and cause for severe punishment. On a  negotiating trip to Pyongyang, Albright dramatized her support for democratic values by wearing her American flag pin. Standing next to North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong-Il, she wore heels to appear taller; so did he.

The Sopranos
Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination
David Sanchez, Ninety Miles
Maya Beiser at TED
Todd Reynolds, Outerborough
The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Abbey Road, Help, and Yellow Submarine
The Dukes of Stratosphear, Chips from the Chocolate Fireball

WWOZ
Louie

Collum McCann, Let the Great World Spin



The three-day weekend :





In order: a red-tailed hawk trying to fly off with a squirrel from my neighbor's yard after successfully staring down a housecat; I made a remark that in haute cuisine, beets are ovah, and it is time for rutabagas to have their moment in the sun, so my friend Kevin took up that challenge and put both in the July 3 crab boil. Rutabagas hold up with the spice and consistency but even I have to admit, the beets somehow assimilated the salty murk of the crab boil and made it something rather wow.; A carnival ride at Storyland behind the Museum in City Park. Say what you want about Lady Gaga - "Poker Face" remains a highly effective, all-purpose pop song on the one zillionth listen.; a very wet dog fetching a stick from a marina in the backest part of back Brusly.

Allen Ginsberg, "America", reposted from Andrew Sullivan

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. 
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. 
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument. 
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister. 
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? 
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

Prince, "America"