become its own mountain

On the walk to school.

Grace Jones, Hurricane Dub
Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
Matthew Dear, Black City
Cerebral Ballzy, The Griptape, Vol. 2
Roots Manuva vs. Wrongtom, Duppy Writer
Aceyalone & the Lonely Ones, The Lonely Ones
Various Artists, ATP I'll Be Your Mirror USA Mixtape

• It's been a busy couple of days.
   
• I'm debating whether it is worth the labyrinthine Special Collections library process required to read LSU's remote storage copy of René Daumal's Mount Analogue. (hat tip to 50 Watts for introducing it to my world) I suspect the process would become its own mountain. I might find wisdom at the top. Or just another mountain.
   
• Zadie Smith prefaces her Believer conversation with Ian McEwan with
    I have often thought Ian McEwan a writer as unlike me as it is possible to be.
   
  despite the fact that the first chapter of Amsterdam seemed Zadie Smith as hell, or maybe vice-sersa. The posturing of semi-ineffectual men-in-authority over a wild woman caged by unfortunate destiny, c'mon. Maybe that is just the Modern English Novel talking and she means something finer that I'm too coarsely American to detect.
  
  Coming off like either writer is not a bad thing, by the way.
     
• Aceyalone comes off awesome, as does Ms. Treasure Davis in this ri-cheer.
  
  
  Aceyalone, "Can't Hold Back" feat. Treasure Davis
    
• There is another copy of Mount Analogue sitting at another library to which I ostensibly have borrowing rights, but I believe I owe fines. I can't log in to see. The question is: do I go through the shuffle of paperwork and endure the restrictions (I'd have to read it under watch in a reading room) to read the free copy, go across town and pay my fines to get it from the less complicated institution, or just buy the damn thing outright? In terms of work-hours, option three is the bargain. I think this might be a question of politics. Do I just choose to own it because it is easier than sharing? Is it time or money, or the mix of both, that is the big hurdle to my not reading right now? Should I own, rent, or just use the thing? Or forget it existed?
  
  If it was available for Kindle, we'd probably not even be having this discussion, presuming you are still listening. Is this a discussion if you, dear reader, have smartly stopped reading at this point? Also, I wonder if actually reading the book will provoke as much thought as have the potentialities around acquiring the book. Is there a difference between acquisition and having? I think I'm at the foothills of a media theory. I'm going to title the resulting book about the experience Climbing Mount Analogue: What is a Book and How Do We Read One. You can forget I said anything and then congratulate me via Facebook after hearing me talking about it on Fresh Air. Yep, it'll be sweet. Wait, where did you go? Hello?

a riding lawnmower on the moon

Country music legend George Jones received a special visitor on Christmas Day when fellow recording artist Ronnie McDowell showed up at his home in Franklin, Tenn., bearing the gift of a portrait --commissioned by George's wife, Nancy -- depicting his DUI arrest while operating a riding lawn mower. From here.

George Jones, The Bradley Barn Sessions

• We should put a riding lawnmower on the moon to commemorate George Jones surviving being George Jones for 80 years!
  
  
  Drive-By Truckers, "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues"
   
• I've been playing with the stats part of the new Blogger and this old post suggesting that George Jones and Irma Thomas get together has gotten more play than I previously realized, so here it is.
   
• I saw old No-Show Jones that Thursday night. His pipes were shot and his band did most of the heavy lifting. It was a run through the numbers; the real George Jones in the room, not the old man in the windbreaker or the wife-beating drunken nightmare, was the one projected into the stale air of the River Center by the audience clinging to that amorphous thing classic country music now represents.
   
• The Bradley Sessions is a good place to go. Jones and Ricky Skaggs and Keith Richards and even Tammy showed up in Owen Bradley's barn during a thunderstorm and made it happen. the reviews complain that it's too clean, but George Jones is generally smooth as whiskey spilled 'cross and Ethan Allen table.
  
  
  George Jones & Keith Richards, "Say It's Not You"
  
  Not from that session, but this is my all-time favorite George Jones tune. Best appearance of Elvis and Fred Flintstone in the same song.
  
  
  George Jones, "The King is Gone"
   
• This is the second DBT video I've sent out this morning. Happy birthday, Lisa and to all the other Lisas out there.
  
  
  Drive-By Truckers, "Lisa's Birthday"

Edited to add: Speaking of the moon, look at that dirty old moon from last night.

My life is a rainbow on fire!

Orange Juice, Rip It Up, Texas Fever
The Pastels, Mobile Safari
[The] Magnetic Fields, Holiday
The National, High Violet
Slowdive, Pygmalion
This Mortal Coil, Filigree and Shadow
Rain Tree Crow, Rain Tree Crow

• The key to navigating modernity is knowing your cocktail. Maya's is pomegranate with brownie chunks, sour gummy bears and "mango drops" from Pinkberry. I am open to frozen yogurt sponsorship of these pages, by the way.
   
• I had a dream the alarm app on my iPad wasn't going off because I hadn't set it right, so I woke up in the dream to check it and then woke up in real life. And a minute late the alarm went off. My life is a rainbow on fire!
   
• Similarly, I when I got to work, I dumped out the latte that had been sitting on my desk since Friday in the office bathroom sink and it was brown and curd-y and splattered everywhere and the sink wouldn't drain. It looked exactly like someone had done - I had done - the most horrible thing a person could do in the sink at the bathroom at the office. I was certain someone was going to walk in and see it and we'd have a Larry David moment while I tried to explain it off, when the sink gurgled and started draining. Spit spot!
   
• Is there a "the" in Magnetic Fields? I replied to a question (possibly from a robot) that "I truly wish I was well-heeled enough in spellcasting to answer." I am into what this day is asking of me.
  
  
  [The] Magnetic Fields, "Strange Powers"
   
• I haven't listened to that last National album since it came out and Bret Easton Ellis reminded me how good they are again.  The infinitude of my day! I won't even go into how we couldn't find a table at the Union for lunch. Not one! Just swoon along with the dour indie baritones.
  
  
  The National, "Lemonworld"

in the sphere of loving

XTC, Oranges and Lemons
Nick Lowe, Labour of Lust
Pere Ubu, Dub Housing
The Rolling Stones, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out: The Rolling Stones in Concert

• I heard Jesus gave the "all-clear" that you can stop hating Muslims now.


• Making an impromptu New Orleans visit is one of the things I really love about not living in New Orleans. I'm not sure I'd make the most of it if I did live there. The weather was magic, the pizza at Slice is right on the money and I don't know why I've never walked through Audubon Park before. I've been there, like, to go to the zoo or, well, maybe that is the only reason I've been there.
  
  
  
  I dig the stinky, crittery thicket that is Bird Island. I love wondering if the hippos Pablo Escobar bought off the financially strapped Audubon Zoo in the 1970's once menaced these fetid waters. I love the pale flowers of the city defying the onset of autumn with bikinis and beach towels. I love how New Orleans loves itself. Sometimes I get tired of how much New Orleans loves itself, getting in there with tweezers and a magnifying glass with its self-love, but today, I was loving its loving.


• Nick Lowe, it must be said, is the best songwriter. Even when the song part isn't the best, the writing is.
  
  
  Nick Lowe, "Dose of You"
  
  Down there at the 2:30 mark, does he not say, "a heel made of high / a dress made of tight" ? Somebody make him poet laureate of wherever. But I digress.


• How the crowd doesn't go apeshit after The sublime reading of "Sympathy For the Devil" on Ya-Ya's I'll never know. Could it be that they were exhausted by the preceding 45-minute deconstruction of "Midnight Rambler", watching a perfectly good song be vivisected and coldly inspected by Victorian scientists looking to scry the future in its entrails? Could it be that Keith Richards and his guitar had been replaced at that point of show by Wile E. Coyote manning an enormous Acme Electromagnet pulling in mailboxes and washing machines and battleships and Sputnik into Madison Square Garden?
  
  
  "Compressed Hare", 1961
  
  Or is that Mick Taylor at the controls? Or was it understood in 1969 that everything was cool ('cept for that overlong confusing war, wait a second...), the Rolling Stones roamed the Earth and didn't suck, so folks were harder to please? All I know is that it bent time so that I could shave off 30 minutes from my usual drive back from New Orleans. Love that. Circling in.


• I think it was magnets. I woke up with an edge on me, and smoothed it down best I could. Maya asks to listen to Oranges and Lemons every time we're in the car - she loves XTC so much that she draws cartoons about them + plus she's becoming a sullen, unresponsive teenager so I'll take what I can get - and since I choose to spend this weird anniversary, about which none of us knows how to feel, in the sphere of loving, here is the only band in her world on the subject.
  
  
  XTC, "The Loving"
  
  All around the world,
  Every boy and every girl,
  Need the loving.
  The humble and the great,
  Even those we think we hate,
  Need the loving.
  
  Soldiers of the Queen,
  All the hard men that we've seen,
  Need the loving.
  Babies at the breast,
  Those in power and those suppressed,
  Need the loving.
  
  Let's face it you just can't hide,
  Your first taste'll send you reeling,
  Like a firework to which we're tied,
  Be prepared to go through your ceiling now.
  
  The loving's coming,
  The loving's more than just an ad man's vision.
  The loving's strumming,
  On your heart strings,
  So loud that you can't help but listen.
  
  Sailors on the seas,
  Or the clergy on their knees,
  Need the loving.
  All the rich and poor,
  Even those we fight at war,
  Need the loving.
  
  That thing that we need most of,
  That stuff we should try before we've died.
  Everyone is begging to be loved,
  With a free gift, a working heart inside.
  
  The loving's coming,
  The loving's advertised in all the papers.
  The loving's humming,
  Your favourite song,
  For once it won't annoy the neighbours.
  
  The loving, the loving.
  
  All round the world,
  Every boy and every girl,
  Need the loving.
  Cold-hearted or warm,
  Every single person born,
  Needs the loving.
  
  Way out there in space,
  Think we'll find that alien race,
  Needs the loving.
  And just to end the list,
  Everything that could exist,
  Needs the loving.
  
  The loving's coming!

"bacon sandwich"

You have to take a lot of blurry pictures of an abandoned feeder to get one discernible hummingbird.

XTC, Black Sea
Oingo Boingo, Nothing to Fear
David Bowie The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
Badly Drawn Boy, The Hour of the Bewilderbeast
Denis Cooper, Train Dreams

• The first tailgate of the season was a bust, but then I am merely a consumer of my buddy John's tailgating largess, and not remotely involved in what it takes to make it happen, so no complaints here. It was a gorgeous day to stroll around campus, traditional game day bacon sandwich or no. Plus, I got the front yard mowed and the hummingbirds were in full stuntshow display, buzzing my heads as I tried to keep the damn camera steady and learn photography on the fly. Still, none of that has the same ring as "bacon sandwich".
  


• I just spent the last hour reading the non-sports facets of ESPN's Grantland webzine thing, and can only imagine how knocked out I'd be if I was into sports. The Chuck Klosterman interview with/profile of Oasis' Noel Gallagher is luminous and this Wright Thompson piece is the best thing written about mescal since Under The Volcano. Volcano has the edge of being one of the best things ever written period. So, anyway, Grantland. Great stuff.
  


• Speaking of great, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is so great that I''m going to stop blogging right now and go finish it ...


• ... And so I did. I attempt to show the fireflies trapped in the jar that is this book over at Goodreads but trying to put in words how good a book it is, it's like using cheap perfume to describe the expensive stuff.
  


• I just walked out under this very moon with my best girl to get a grocery bag full of chips and salsa.

Location:Baton Rouge,United States

Move a fin and the world turns

@SocialStructure installation at Foster Hall Gallery, LSU, Sept. 9, 2011/ More pics here.

Benjamin Broening/Duo Runedako, Recombinant Nocturnes
So Percussion, Steve Mackey: It Is Time (out Sept. 27 from Cantaloupe Music)
Jacks, Vacant World
Wooden Wand, Death Seat
Logistic Minutia, Logistic Minutia
Sufjan Stevens, Enjoy Your Rabbit

• It's about to close in 2 hours of this writing, so this doesn't help you, but the @SocialStructure installation (see above) at Foster Hall Gallery is very cool. You get to move things around, make spooky noises, images feed to and from twitter, I saw my own name pop up on there while I was in there.
  


• I just finished the polish on an interview with one of the dudes from Dengue Fever. I'm glad it was the dude, talking with Chholm Nimol on the phone my be more than my feeble heart can handle. Anyway, we got on about Asian psychedelia and I brought up the moody Japanese psych-folk band Jacks, whose Vacant World is right now cutting donuts on the surface of my space/time continuum. I #humblebrag that I was surprised the Dengue Fever dude had yet to be hipped to Jacks.
  
  
  Jacks, "In the Broken Mirror"
  
  The skinny on Jacks came to me from Julian Cope's Japrocksampler, a book I couldn't quite embrace while reading it but has in memory served magnificently as the catalyst it intends to be. That seems the noblest of goals for which non-fiction can strive.
  
  Dengue Fever's new album Cannibal Courtship is aces. Spotify it already.
  


• I came across Wooden Wand buried deep in my iTunes library. I contend the hoarding tendencies new media fosters - the cloud is like a rental storage unit for you to house your digital trash-pickings - retains some of the charms of flip-flip-flip record hunting, even if it is scroll-scroll-scroll. And it's your record store.
  


• I like the world-from-my-chair aspect of digital culture. It's like when the Victorians would paint a room in their house red and stock it with exotic knick-knacks from the Orient or Darkest Inja to imply a worldliness that they didn't actually have. I'm down with that kind of fake-out. Expand yourself by whatever means necessary. I was palying with Photosynth's iPhone panorama-o-matic app and thought of a line from Throbbing Gristle's "Six Six Sixties"
  
  I am one of the injured
  A tear blurs flesh
  Dissolving
  Like an injured dog
  Like wasted limbs
  Get smaller
  Pain is the stimulus of pain
  But then of course nothing is cured
  This is the world now
  Move a fin and the world turns
  Sit in a chair and pictures change
  Try to eat us
  And get trapped
  Or injured
  Just
  
  I mean, there is a noir gibberish factor to TG, but my friend Jaan who turned me on to them eons ago used to quote that highlighted line a lot, and I think its right. We are swimming in it. Below, you can sit in my chair and change the pictures.
  
  
  Take a spin in my office chair. Click here if the embed thingy doesn't work for you.
  
  

A Reaction to Steve Reich's "WTC 9/11"

Original cover photo of Steve Reich's WTC 9/11, via the Washington Post

Steve Reich with Kronos Quartet and So Percussion, WTC 9/11 (streaming at NPR)

• Despite the contention about the original cover photo (shown above), Steve Reich's commemorative piece "WTC 9/11" is warm, engaged, non-sensational. Reich's acumen for chopping up text (stretching back to "It's Gonna Rain" in the mid-60's through "Different Trains" in the late 80's to "City Life" in 2002) is here used in the greatest sympathy to the music; the string quartet matches the tenor of shocked reactions yet maintains clamped anxiety, which is what I remember of 9/11.
   
• I was pulling into a parking lot at work in Kansas City when I heard the news, comparing sketchy data with my co-workers as we made it up the sidewalk. The first tower had already fallen; I got to the conference room to see the second collapse on the big screen. The boss had already called the people we dealt with that worked in the tower and they got out quickly. We gathered our collective confused horror and left for the day, eyeballing the mini-NYC that is the Kansas City skyline and the blue sky above it.
   
• Kansas City's proximity to Whiteman Airforce Base, home of the Stealth Bomber and employer of my father-in-law, plus its role in the rail networks made it a common-knowledge "target city." Target cities were part of the Cold War folklore of my youth; we professed to know what was going to be bombed in what order. There were missile silos all around there. The nation's hard copy archives are trucked to Missouri and stored in cold, limestone caves. There was a lot to destroy in Kansas City. My daughter wasn't even one yet. Is 9/11 in her folklore, now that she just starting to misunderstand and spread her version of the history she is living?
   
• Reich's "Mallet Quartet" that follows "WTC 9/11" on the CD comes as a relief. It is his worker-bee form of maximal-minimalism, fraught with its own jarring twitch, but one we can, with a sigh, easily accommodate. We twitch now. The melodies walk So Percussion's marimbas and vibraphones like a gang of cats traversing a room of mousetraps; elegant, cocky, but furtive. We have been that gang of cats in the ensuing decade.  Waiting for a snap that doesn't come.
   
• The 2002 "Dance Patterns" that caps the disc is of a different time, from before our consciousness was spread like crepe batter across the hot griddle of social media, before what we wanted to watch on TV was exploded  versions of "real" people getting their feelings hurt, before we were considering giving into the robots as David Rushkoff (kinda) suggests in this daring piece "Are Jobs Obsolete" bubbling up from the morning's data feed. We didn't consider jobs or anything about ourselves to be obsolete before this century got rolling. We were like Reich's complicated boogie-woogie, a mish-mash of interlocked contexts spinning along or locking gears, but going somewhere, man! Somewhere great! Let's do this thing! Now we are in a  political climate where communal effort is suspect, people are shoring up about Satan and thieves again, our first concern with stepping foot in the new digital world is how do we protect these new naked flanks. Reich's "dancers" have none of that hesitation. They are indifferent to the world outside of their patterns, too wrapped up in the glory of enterprise to worry about the ill wills of others. Arrogant and lithe. Calm as cats, not a mousetrap in sight.