60¢

Edouard Levé, Suicide
Adele, 21
Richard Buckner, Our Blood (streaming at NPR)
Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Kronos Quartet, Feldman: Piano & String Quartet
Kreutzer Quartet, Coates: String Quartet No. 9 - Sonata for Violin Solo - Lyric Suite

• Lately, I'm finding more satisfaction with reviews over at Goodreads than on any of the other social media platforms. I'm on Google+; feel free to plus me or circle me or whatever it is, but I haven't been moved to really put myself out there yet. I'm not LinkedIn or Quora-ed or Formsprung in any appreciable degree. Come March when the new book comes out (launch date is looking like March 9 or 10, 2011) I'll get on the promotional edge of things. Until then, I did get loquacious on Suicide last night, if you are feeling deprived.
  
  
• Re Adele: I've heard "Rolling in the Deep" at least three times every time I've been to the pool this summer and I'm still not sick of it. The whole of 21 is a little syrupy for me, but I could not get sick of "I'll Be Waiting" when it gets its turn.
  
  
• I was rolling through the drizzle - not a Snoop Doggesque malaprop; it was lightly raining - cutting through Coates Hall after checking out Delmore Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities from the library, prompted by a discussion at this weekend's pool party when I came across...
  
  
• A WOLFGANG PUCK-THEMED OLD-SCHOOL COFFEE MACHINE!
  
  
  
• The kind from which Larry Tate would get his coffee. Or George Jetson. Or WOLFGANG PUCK. Besides the Mad Men wow factor of it, I'm particularly stoked because I think this might be the self-same coffee machine from twenty years ago where as a student, in the Era Before Coffeeshops, I'd get coffee when coming back from the computer labs. It was in this same spot, next to the pay phone I'd have to make a collect call from because I used my last quarters on coffee. It is still 60¢, a price so archaically low that it is not directly bloggable by modern keyboards for the lack of a ¢ key. I needed exact change; machines in the past didn't make change! I had to buy some Mentos from the union to get change, because people in the present don't make change either! It was worth the effort. In dreams begin responsibilities, or so the mad poet of Lou Reed's undergraduate years would offer. I shot footage!
  
  
  
  The controls feel like those of your pod at Space Mountain. The clamor in the background is a talking video Coke machine that plays that Drake Sprite commercial over and over, like a robot from the future coming to annoy us all to death. I'm waiting for the day a grumpy Intro to Philosophy prof from lecture hall around the corner smashes it into silence with the last wooden upright chair in the whole higher education system.
  
  
  The modern corrective to this gush of nostalgia: you don't get a lot of coffee for 60¢. Still, I'm so enamored with the old Coates hall coffee machine that I'm gonna listen to Gloria Coates bend time around a string quartet for the rest of the afternoon.
  

The apostrophes make it quick!

The sausage section inside the Poche's mini-mart inside Boutin's. It's like a turducken of Cajun food providers! That sells turducken!

Saturday:
Edouard Levé, Suicide
David Bowie, Scary Monsters
Echo & the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain
Amy Winehouse, Back to Black

Sunday:
Yes, The Yes Album
The Byrds, Fifth Dimension
Aldubáran, Glód
Lou Reed, The Blue Mask
Bruce Springsteen, Lucky Town


Monday:
Tortoise, It's All Around You
Tommy Guerrero, Lifeboats and Follies
The Lounge Lizards, Voice of Chunk
Audience, The House on the Hill
Fitz & the Tantrums, Pickin' Up the Pieces
The Whitefield Brothers, Earthology

Finalizing book edits, so I'll make this quick:  mowin' the back yard, wonderin' how I never noticed the orchestra on Ocean Rain before, Amy Winehouse listenin', swimmin', grillin', hamburger eatin',boudin-in', Lou Reedin', Bruce Springsteenin', comic book academics outclassin' me as a nerd, story-tellin', prog rock-evangelizin', wafflin', coffee, mowin' the front yard, more hamburger eatin', Suicide, more swimmin', snoozin' through Breaking Bad, snoozin' through True Blood, snoozin' through Suicide, Raisin Bran CRUNCH!in', horse camp, editin', meetings, havin' lunch where there was a deli lunch counter for a different business inside the restaurant where you can get a plate lunch instead of what's on the restaurant's menu and really, who wouldn't automatically opt for a plate lunch even though it's a bit awkward with the waiter who is just filling your ice tea the whole time but I'm not a total asshole and therefore tippin' as if he did the whole thing himself, more editin', resistin' the urge to do some Mick Jagger prancin' around the office to Fitz & the Tantrums, editin'.

The apostrophes make it quick!

n-thousandth

The butterfly habitat at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

White Stripes, White Blood Cells
The Who, Who Are You and Face Dances
Pavement, Terror Twilight
Crushed Stars, The Refracted Light of Crushed Stars

• My buddy Dave wins the day with his story  "F.I.N.E." It breaks new ground in the description of bare feet in fiction. It drove me to the White Stripes and their dead leaves and dirty ground but truthfully, it's not that far of a drive. In the imagined garage rock band my daughter and I have, we play the crap out of "Dead Leaves" in that little corner of the farmer's market and then go into any AC/DC song then back in to "Fell in Love with a Girl" and a food fight of mixed greens and pricy tomatoes breaks out and then things get rull when the guy from the shrimp stand gets involved.
  
• Terror Twilight is not The Pavement Album, the definer or the smart start for the novice, but it's really the only one I want to listen to anymore. It is a graceful bow-out for such an egregiously and preciously ungainly band. Same could be said for the Jones-era Who in Who Are You except the Who (whoever is the Who at any given moment) never quits. The Who is the dog forever stretching its tether tight, barking at just the right moment when you walk by the yard to give you a chill in your spine. Every time, even when you see them coming from down the street.
  
• I generally love Face Dances. Does "The Quiet One" get the credit for inventing hair metal?
  
• I totally love "Let My Love Open the Door." Pete Townshend's controversies might make this an inappropriate song for mine and Maya's imaginary farmers' market rock band.
  
  
  
  
• OK, now that I've listened to the whole thing, I might backtrack a little on Who Are You. "Trick of the Light" and "Guitar and Pen" are cracked-open geodes of rock glory and the title song is the kind of excess which with is paved the road to the palace of wisdom, even on the n-thousandth listen (see last night's Louie) but otherwise, there is little dignity to be found here. Roger Daltrey's brand of over-doing it vs. the lite-prog-ish numbers reminds me of the time some friends talked me into doing Tom Jones song at karaoke and there is no way to not belt out a Tom Jones song and so I did and it was uncomfortable for everyone - "Delilah" goes on a lot longer than you think - and it's why I don't do karaoke anymore. I got enough problems.

RIP Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud, Reflection (Self Potrtrait), 1985

Yesterday:
Yo La Tengo, Ride the Tiger
Throwing Muses, House Tornado
Modest Mouse, The Lonesome Crowded West
Gillian Welch, The Harrow & the Harvest
Various Artists, Wizzzz French Psychorama 1966-1970 Volume 2    
Björk, Biophilia (iPad app version)
Edouard Levé, Suicide

Today:

Pavement, Terror Twilight
The Postal Service, Give Up
Gorillaz, The Fall

NYT obit

My safe word is "HIPPOS!"

From the bat bridge in Houston. You've been warned.

Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
Drug Kingpin Hippos
Harper's Bizarre, Feelin' Groovy: The Best of Harper's Bizarre
R.E.M., Dead Letter Office/Chronic Town
Edouard Levé, Suicide

• Drug Kingpin Hippos on Animal Planet is the reason that Ted Turner died for our sins and brought the light of cable television down from the mountains of the gods to us mortals. It's an hour-long documentary about the hippos that Pablo Escobar bought from Audubon Zoo in the 1970's (the zoo was pretty cash-strapped back then) to stock his private zoo at his Colombian compound Hacienda Nápoles. When Escobar died in 1993, the estate went in disrepair and the hippos ran feral, basically granting Colombia the largest hippo population outside of Africa.
  
  There is in Drug Kingpin Hippos plenty of raging, tusks-aflare hippo footage with which ones dreams may be haunted, and endless repeats of how hippos kill more humans each year than any other animal in Africa. Add into that a dumbed-down history of the War on Drugs and the fact that one hippo still terrorizes the swamps outside Medellin, "a living symbol of Escobar's lasting terror on the country." Did you know Hacienda Nápoles is a theme park now? Thank you, TV!
  
  
• No amount of recreational sedatives can make Harper's Bizarre not sound ridiculous.
  
  
  Harper's Bizarre, "I Can Hear the Darkness" I want to hear this issuing from a crackling PA as I suffer a cotton candy headache on the carousel at Hacienda Nápoles.
  
  
• I'm not sure if I enjoyed Imperial Bedrooms (reviewed up at the Goodreads) as much as I enjoyed the enjoyment of it, if that makes sense. Isn't that how the whole degradation fetish thing works anyway? I'm not sure. I am the least hedonistic person in the world that digs kinky literature.  Perusing the other reviews, I suppose I should be more appalled by the book than I am, but I had my college This Is Literature moment with Bataille, Burroughs, Genet and The Olympia Reader, about which one Goodreads commenter astutely remarks, Remember when "erotica" was more porny? Maybe that formative exposure to desensitized literary cruelty is why I find the fact that the cash strapped Audubon Zoo sold the world's most notorious criminal some hippos a delightful morsel of Truth. My soul is defiled with cartoon rot, it seems. My safe word is "HIPPOS!"
  
  
• This one is a corker.
  
  
  Harper's Bizarre, "I Lost My Love Today"  I love when a sickly sweet band gets vaguely menacing. It's how I feel when I read trangressive fiction. This is also how the sinister algebra of Wes Anderson works.
  
  
• Like nerd-era R.E.M. on their cover of Pylon's "Crazy." There is something about the existential crisis in "your head is shakin'/ cuz' your arms are shakin' / your feet are shakin' / cuz' the earth is shakin'"
  and "no / thing / can / HURT / YOU" that gives me a chill every time. We are pawns of the cosmos, invincible like Pablo Escobar riding three-wheelers around our menageries in our jungle compounds, burning $2 million in cash to keep our daughters warm, kings of the world, until we get eaten by our own swamp hippos. Crazy, y'all.
  
  
  R.E.M. "Crazy (live)"
  

My 7 Links

Maya's breakfast at the hotel in Houston. She's the one who should be blogging.

Drive-By Truckers, Go-Go Boots
Centro-Matic, Candidate Waltz
Low, C'mon

I was tagged by my friend Frank at Lemons and Beans, (tapped himself by Grantourismo / Trip Base ) to pick seven posts from the pile that fit the following descriptions.

Most Beautiful: something between a cockfight and a wizard standoff



My blog is lousy with lousy pictures from a lousy photographer but this offhand snap of someone walking beside me at Spanish Town Mardi Gras justified the monkey/typewriter/Shakespeare relationship I have with photography.

Most Popular: Boo Fries at Acme Oyster House, Baton Rouge



In the five years (really?) I've had this blog (I've had others, I add rakishly), the page count has really only blown up twice; most recently in a post about my friend Jeanne Leiby's passing and back in 2008 over a re-post of a review where I make mild fun of Bob Dylan. I am a fan of the tortoise over the hare and the top subject that brings people to my site outside of my own name consistently is "boo fries". I still haven't been back to Acme Oyster House, but maybe I should cash in on all the fame I am bringing to them, or at least to myself through them.

Most Controversial: Feeding the Monkey in My Soul



By far, the most (only) controversial thing I have ever said on the Internet is that I don't care for Steely Dan, so much so that a guy wanted to take me outside of Frank's bar one night and straighten me out and that WNYC had me on the air to discuss this most peculiar of dislikes. The producer told me I was the only critic they could find that would publicly talk against them, and really, I don't even hate the band like I once did. The exercise that I went through on a previous blog (this discussion has transcended the blog barrier, so contentious it is) in fact taught me, in a way, how to not hate but to channel distaste into something useful. It was a valuable experience and continues to be one.

I still hate Supertramp.

Most Helpful: When 50,000 Hippies Descended on Prairieville



This research-dump of info about the 1969 New Orleans Pop Festival, the massive pop festival that took place in Praireville two weeks after Woodstock, was useful to me - it turned into a 225 article for which I was paid - and to those whose hazy memories continue to trickle into focus a year later.

Most Surprising: 33 1/3 Update



I'm not sure there is a surprising post up in here; my blog is mostly a catalogging of what I listen to, read, eat, watch and think about, so in the manner that flying a plane is a million little corrections that keep you from crashing, alexvcook.com is comprised of a million little surprises. The biggest surprise of it all is that blogging about songs on LiveJournal got me in with outsideleft which got me my first book which got me gigs writing for area magazines and made me a professional writer which got me inclusions in my favorite magazines on earth which got me a second book and who knows what's next. So thanks, blogging!

This one post where I made it to the semi-finals in getting a 33 1/3 book written was pretty cool and and more than a little surprising. I didn't make the final cut and I blame fellow blog traveler Scott from Pretty Goes With Pretty who I'm convinced edged me out with his book on Slint, but he's a good guy and it is a good book, so it's, as they say, all good.

Most Underrated: all I have



I'm not sure what this question is asking, or really how to answer it. My blog has a peculiar process-oriented focus and when the subject of reading my blog comes up in IRL conversation, most folks say "well... I don't read everything on there" like there would be any expectation that they would. I've toyed with titration of content, crowd-sourcing, even with doing some cursory copyediting on these posts but ultimately my Internet life is a lot like how I approached painting when I did that. I wanted my art to be a precipitate of my life, something that was spun from this one thread of humanity I have and in that sense, it's not too bad a weave. I ain't making jack off AdWords or selling any books but if space aliens were to emerge from the clouds and zap me into dust, I think you could almost reconstitute me from old blog posts.

So, what falls at the bottom of my sad Google Analytics breakdown? Yesterday's post with the Louis C.K. video. Admittedly not much of a post, but I thought the bullet-point poetry was sorta clever and c'mon, Louis C. K. is on fire. Surely more people care about him than they do "boo fries." Above is a different Louis C.K. video; maybe you'll like that better.

Most Proud Of: A Reverse Abecedary Poem for the Visceral Realists

Zealots!
your Xanadu washed vacant under torrents
stupid rain
quiet precipitation offering no meaning
like ketamine junkies in hallways
greedily, feverishly eating death
carrying bones around

I dunno, is blogging something to be proud of? What makes something the most noblest of blog posts? And if something is truly great and good, doesn't it transcend the grip of pride? Doesn't pride get you in the end? It's perhaps important to note that lions travel in prides and they are largely lazy, carrion-feeding blowhards that get undeserved credit for being kings of the jungle.

My first forays into the business of adult creativity were as a structuralist poet and while I recognize the one thing of less real use to the world than a blogger is a structuralist poet, I'm happy I can pull it out when the moment calls. Plus, that post was one of those trapeze-act numbers where I go all about the tent and wind up at the same platform, and I like when I can do that.

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.