Finished the copyediting responses on my book last night with the nightmare that is Dance Moms rattling on in the background. That's the excuse I made for the TV still being on Lifetime this morning and I'm sticking to it.
I will concede to the general consensus that Delmore Schwartz's story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" is a work of postmodern-before-we-called-it-postmodern genius - a story about a dream about a movie about the author's life, rife with lots of time/space hooks and the terror that is causality - but "Screeno", the tale that cabooses this story collection, similarly about the movies as a social experience and how delicately the boundaries in a shared social sphere must be maintained lest the bubble burst, deserves some love. Even though it ends weird.
Out of ideas. I put together a playlist of albums that have some sort of American flag on the cover; we'll see how that goes. According to this discussion, there is one on the back right corner of White Light/White Heat. I don't see it, but its reason enough to pull it out. To be honest, I'll probably only listen to "Downbound Train" off Born in the U.S.A. and wish it was the Smithereens version.
BitUSA is one of those omnipresent albums of my youth like Purple Rain that I can't listen to without instinctively reaching for the radio dial. "Family Affair" might be the best song ever no matter how many times I hear it.
My lil' preview of the August 11 Gillian Welch show in New Orleans is up in the current issue of OffBeat. Also in that issue is Brian Boyles' excellent account of when in 1986 Wynton Marsalis called Miles Davis out on some shit. On Miles' stage. Wynton's got a pair.
OK, I love stupid old "I'm Goin' Down" too. Maya just said, "This sounds a whole lot like Ringo."
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 Suicidelast 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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 myfavoritemagazines 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.
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.
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.
